Experience and Judgment, Husserl points out that logic, or our formal knowledge, is based on prepredicative experience, our everyday living. As he puts it, “All predicative self-evidence must be ultimately grounded on the self-evidence of experience”; the task is to show that the origin of formal predicative logic is nothing but “the world of experience immediately pregiven and prior to all logical functions.” It is the world in which we live that “furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination.”88
Proceeding from this understanding of the constitution of the world, Husserl shows not only the original ground of formal knowledge but also the constitution of positive sciences.89 As he suggests, philosophical considerations are different from theoretical reconfiguration of the world in natural science, because physicists “have a completely different attitude”;90 yet the basis for both is the life-world.
LEBENSWELT
In ordinary life, we have nothing whatever to do with nature-Objects. What we take as things are pictures, statues, gardens, houses, tables, clothes, tools, etc. These are all value-Objects of various kinds, use-Objects, practical Objects. They are not Objects which can be found in natural science.91
Husserl recognizes that human experience is based on the particular finite experience of the world in which we live. We experience things in the world and our experience is always already based on our previous experience, even before we reflect on our understanding. So Husserl brings to the fore our experience of the life-world by showing that it is based on “seeing” and understanding things according to “types.” This experience of typicalities growing out of particularities is a basis for the possibility of knowledge, but this typicality is not thematized. It is not a theoretical insight. In other words, despite the fact that the life-world is perceived as nothing but many typicalities that we encounter in our everyday living, we are not aware of this. Our experience of the life-world is unreflective. Once we realize this, we can reflect upon these “types”; understanding experience by investigating and abstracting from particularities to discern the typical structures that illuminate them. When we bring this latent understanding, or, as Husserl calls it, prepredicative experience, into relief, we can thematize those typical instances—eidetic structures—on which our understanding is based.92
As Husserl writes, “Thanks to [the] recoverable past given through memory and also to expectations which predelineate the living future for us it is a thoroughly typified world. All that exists within it, whether known or unknown, is an object of experience with the form: an A, and, this A”93 (i.e., a house per se, and this particular house in which I live). Schütz puts it this way:
The unquestioned pre-experiences are [. . .] from the outset, at hand as typical ones, that is, as carrying along open horizons of anticipated similar experiences. For example, the outer world is not experienced as an arrangement of individual unique objects, dispersed in space and time, but as “mountains,” “trees,” “animals,” “fellowmen.”94
Husserl suggests that although these types are played out differently in different human communities in different periods, their essential structures are independent of any and every culture. Phenomenology, by the bracketing out of the world, discloses these “typicalities” that can be discerned across different surrounding worlds.95 When these structures are revealed and described, they can be understood by anyone practicing phenomenology, anywhere, independent of the “time and place” of our own lives. Once revealed, they can serve as “templates” to help us understand other typical instances of phenomena in different surrounding worlds. By transcending our particular position, we can understand the experiences of others.96 Landgrebe speaks of the basic description of “our immediate way of having the world [as] the distinction between near and far, between near-world and far-world, though these concepts at once involve more than spatial relations.”97 From this basic structure, we can imagine the extension of this opposition to variants such as the “home-world” as opposed to the “alien or foreign world.”98 According to Husserl, the typical structure is the “essential difference between familiarity and strangeness.”99 This difference can manifest itself in many guises, but it is typical for human communities through their different ways of living.100
For Husserl, then, the world is the horizon to all of our positing acts; as Landgrebe puts it, the world is “the doxic basis persisting throughout all experiences.”101 Things always manifest themselves against the background of the world. It follows, then, that if the world is “the universally fundamental doxic thesis,” it cannot be construed simply “as a blind ‘prejudice.’”102 We need to rethink this understanding of the world. Rather, as Landgrebe shows, our thinking about the world, based on the doxic thesis, “is not a definite act, explicitly performed at some time or other, but rather the foundation for every definite act.” We live in the world and our understanding is based on it, or, rather, drawn from it. We do not reflect on this fundamental starting point, and, when performing theoretical acts, we forget that they are couched in this originary encounter with the world that is always the backdrop to our experience of things themselves. Our “belief in the world” is the basis from which our theorizing begins.103
As Husserl affirms, things themselves are the primary guide that will lead us to knowledge in general. We need to recognize that our knowledge is based on our experience of the life-world. Duc Thao Trân states: “The truth of predicative forms is founded on the movement of antepredicative experience.”104 Epistēmē is always already based on doxa.
DOXA AND EPISTĒMĒ: “BACK TO THE THINGS THEMSELVES”—ZU DEN SACHEN SELBST!
Profound thought is an indication of chaos, which genuine science aims to transform into a cosmos, a simple, entirely clear, dissolved order.105
In his 1917 inaugural lecture in Freiburg im Breisgau, Husserl affirms the recognition of the primacy of the world with his call to return to things themselves when he says: “Natural objects [. . .] must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur. [. . .] There is consciousness of the original as being there ‘in person.’”106 As we live in the world, we pass judgments about things according to our “natural attitude”:107 we simply take for granted that the world is outside us, and we encounter it unproblematically as being simply there. Yet, as Husserl notes also, natural attitude is ignorant of the “bestowal of sense.”108 That is, we are ignorant that it is we ourselves who constitute the world’s meaning. It is this attitude that Husserl challenges by showing that “the objects would be nothing at all for the cognizing subject if they did not ‘appear’ to him, if he had of them no ‘phenomenon.’” In other words, only by disclosing the constitution of meaning of the world we live in, only by showing the lawful structure of our experience, can we confront not only the charges of relativism and skepticism,109 but also our own human participation in the erection of the mathematized structure of the world of positive sciences.
So, if Husserl is right and doxa is the stepping-stone toward epistēmē—knowledge—there must be a way to account for this progression. This is the problem that Husserl tries to confront in his last work.
Husserl’s conception of truth changes between the writing of LI and the writing of Ideas and FTL. In LI, Husserl speaks of truth-in-itself. The idea of truth is the idea that truth is a property of judgment. In his introduction to the revised version of LI, Husserl notes that “theoretical thinking and cognition are accomplished in statements,” hence the need for the “epistemologically clarifying efforts” that take as their starting objective “the essence of ‘expressing.’”110 This idea is dealt with in Expression and Meaning, the first volume of LI. However, as Husserl notes,
