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[勞思光] [許國宏] [呂健吉] [郭朝順] [黃冠閔] [伍至學] [龔維正] [陳振崑] [冀劍制] |
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黃冠閔之哲學教學網
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Edmund
Husserl, THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN SCIENCES and the transcendental phenomenolgy
(tr.
David Carr) (§37-§55) [142] § 37. The formal and most general structures of the life-world: thing and
world on the one side, thing-consciousness on the other. IF WE SEEK OUT, simply looking around us, what is formal and general, what remains
invariant in the life-world throughout all alterations of the relative, we
involuntarily stop at what alone determines for us in life the sense of talking
about the world: the world is the universe of things, which are distributed
within the world-form of space-time and are "positional" in two senses
(according to spatial position and temporal position) - the spatiotemporal onta. Here would thus be found the task of a life-world ontology, understood as
a concretely general doctrine of essence for these onta. For
our interest in the present context it suffices to have indicated this. Rather
than spend our time here, we prefer to move on to a task which is much greater,
as will soon be seen-one which in fact encompasses such a doctrine. In order to
prepare the way for this new subject of investigation, which also essentially
concerns the life-world but is not ontological, we shall undertake a general
reflection-we, that is, as waking, living human beings in the life-world (and
thus naturally within the epoche regarding all interference of positive
scientific discipline). This general reflection will at
the same time have the function of making evident an essential distinction
among the possible ways in which the pregiven world, the ontic universe [das ontische Universum], can become thematic for us.
Calling to mind what has repeatedly been said: the life-world, for us who
wakingly live in it, is always already there, existing in advance for us, the
"ground" of all praxis whether theoretical or extratheoretical.
The world is pregiven to us, the waking, always somehow practically
interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily as the
universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. To live is always
to live-in-certainty-of-theworld. Waking life is being awake to the world,
being constantly and directly "conscious" of the world and of oneself
as living in the world, actually experiencing [erleben] and actually effecting the ontic certainty of the world. The world is pregiven
thereby, in every case, in such a way that individual things are given. But
there exists a fundamental difference between the way we are conscious of the
world and the way we are conscious of things or objects (taken in the broadest
sense, but still purely in the sense of the life-world), though together the two
make up an inseparable unity. Things, objects (always understood purely in
the sense of the life-world), are "given" as being valid for us in
each case (in some mode or other of ontic certainty) but in principle only in
such a way that we are conscious of them as things or objects within the world-horizon. Each one is something, "something of"
the world of which we are constantly conscious as a horizon. On the other hand,
we are conscious of this horizon only as a horizon for existing objects; without
particular objects of consciousness it cannot be actual [aktuell]. Every object has its possible
varying modes of being valid, the modalizations of ontic certainty. The world,
on the other hand, does not exist as an entity, as an object, but exists
with such uniqueness that the plural makes no sense when applied to it. Every
plural, and every singular drawn from it, presupposes the world-horizon. This
difference between the manner of being of an object in the world and that of the
world itself obviously prescribes fundamentally different correlative types
of consciousness for them. § 38. The two possible fundamental ways of making the life-world thematic:
the naäve and natural straightforward attitude and the idea of a
consistently reflective attitude toward the "how" of the subjective
manner of givenness of life-world and life-world objects. THESE MOST
GENERAL features of waking life make up the formal framework
within which it now becomes possible to distinguish the different ways this life
is carried on, though in all cases the world is pregiven and, within this
horizon, objects are given. These ways result in the different manners, we could
also [144] say, in which we are awake to the world and to the objects in the world.
The first, the naturally normal one which absolutely must precede the others not
for accidental but for essential reasons, is that of straightforwardly living
toward whatever objects are given, thus toward the world-horizon, in normal,
unbroken constancy, in a synthetic coherence running through all acts. This
normal, straightforward living, toward whatever objects are given, indicates
that all our interests have their goals in objects. The pregiven world is the
horizon which includes all our goals, all our ends, whether fleeting or lasting,
in a flowing but constant manner, just as an intentional
horizon-consciousness implicitly "encompasses" [everything] in
advance. We, the subjects, in our normal, unbroken, coherent life, know no goals
which extend beyond this; indeed we have no idea that there could be others. All
our theoretical and practical themes, we can also say, lie always within the
normal coherence of the life-horizon "world." World is the universal
field into which all our acts, whether of experiencing, of knowing, or of
outward action, are directed. From this field, or from objects in each case
already given, come all affections, transforming themselves in each case into
actions. Yet there can be a completely different sort of waking life involved in
the conscious having of the world. It would consist in a transformation of the
thematic consciousness of the world which breaks through the normality of
straightforward living. Let us direct our attention to the fact that in general
the world or, rather, objects are not merely pregiven to us all in such a way
that we simply have them as the substrates of their properties but that we
become conscious of them (and of everything ontically meant) through
subjective manners of appearance, or manners of givenness, without noticing it
in particular; in fact we are for the most part not even aware of it at all. Let
us now shape this into a new universal direction of interest; let us establish a
consistent universal interest in the "how" of the manners of givenness
and in the onta themselves, not straightforwardly but rather as objects in respect
to their "how"-- that is, with our interest exclusively and constantly
directed toward how, throughout the alteration of relative validities, subjective appearances,
and opinions, the coherent, universal validity world
-- the
world
--comes into being for us; how, that is,
there arises in us the constant consciousness of the universal existence,
of the universal horizon, of real, actually existing objects, [145 each of which we are conscious of
only through the alterations of our relative conceptions [Aufassungen]
of it, of its manners of
appearing, its modes of validity, even when we are conscious of it in
particularity as something simply being there. In this total change of interest, carried out with a new consistency
founded on a particular resolve of the will, we notice that we acquire a number
of never thematically investigated types, not only of individual things but also
of syntheses, in an inseparable synthetic totality which is constantly produced
by intentionally overlapping horizon-validities; and the latter influence
each other reciprocally in the form of corroborating verifications of existence,
or refuting cancelings-out, or other modalizations. This is the essential
character of the synthetic totality in which we can take possession of something
previously completely unknown, something never envisioned or grasped as a task
for knowledge; this is the universal accomplishing life in which the world comes
to be as existing for us constantly in flowing particularity, constantly "pregiven"
to us. We can also say: this is the synthetic totality in which we now discover,
for the first time, that and how the world, as correlate of a discoverable
universe of synthetically connected accomplishments, acquires its ontic
meaning and its ontic validity in the totality of its ontic [ontische] structures. But here we do not need to go into more detailed expositions, into
everything that can become thematic. What is essential for us here is the
distinction between the two types of investigation,' each regarded as a
universal investigation. The natural life, whether it is prescientifically or scientifically,
theoretically or practically interested, is life within a universal unthematic
horizon. This horizon is, in the natural attitude, precisely the world always
pregiven as that which exists. Simply living on in this manner, one does not
need the word "pregiven"; there is no need to point out that the world
is constantly actuality for pus. All natural questions, all theoretical and
practical goals taken as themes -- as existing, as perhaps existing, as
probable, as questionable, as valuable, as project, as action and result of
action -- have to do with something or other within the world-horizon. This is true
even of illusions, nonactualities, since everything characterized through
some modality of being is, after all, related to actual being. For, in advance,
"world" has the meaning "the universe of the `actually' existing
actualities": not the merely supposed, doubtful, or questionable
actualities but the actual ones, which as such have actuality for us only in the
constant movement of corrections and revisions of validities [Umgeltungen von Geltungen]- all this considered as the anticipation of an ideal unity. Instead of persisting in this manner of
"straightforwardly living into the world," let us attempt a universal
change of interest in which the new expression "pregivenness of the
world" becomes necessary because it is the title for this differently
directed and yet again universal theme of the manners of pregivenness. In
other words, nothing shall interest us but precisely that subjective alteration
of manners of givenness, of manners of appearing and of the modes of validity in
them, which, in its constant process, synthetically connected as it incessantly
flows on, brings about the coherent consciousness of the straightforward
"being" of the world. Among the objects of the life-world we also find human
beings, with all their human action and concern, works and suffering, living in
common in the world-horizon in their particular social interrelations and
knowing themselves to be such. All this, too, then, shall be included as we
carry out our new universal direction of interest. A coherent theoretical
interest shall now be directed exclusively toward the universe of the
subjective, in which the world, in virtue of the universality of synthetically
bound accomplishments in this universe, comes to have its straightforward
existence for us. In the natural and normal world-life this subjective manifold
constantly goes on, but there it remains constantly and necessarily concealed.
How, by what method, is it to be revealed? Can it be shown to be a self-enclosed
universe with its own theoretical and consistently maintained inquiry,
revealing itself as the all-encompassing unity of ultimately functioning and
accomplishing subjectivity which is to account for the existence of the world--
the world for us, our natural life-horizon? If this is a legitimate and a
necessary task, its execution implies the creation of a new science of a
peculiar sort. In opposition to all previously designed objective sciences,
which are sciences on the ground of the world, this would be a science of the
universal how of the pregivenness of the world, i.e., of what makes it a
universal ground for any sort of objectivity. And included in this is the
creation of a science of the ultimate grounds [Gründe] which supply the true force of all
objective [147 grounding, the force arising from its ultimate bestowal
of meaning. Our historically motivated path,
moving from the interpretation of the interplay of problems between Hume and Kant, has now led us to the postulate of
clarifying the pregiven world's character of universally "being the
ground" for all objective sciences and-what followed of itself-for all
objective praxis; it has led us, then, to the postulate of that novel universal
science of subjectivity as pregiving the world. We shall now have to see how we
can fulfill this postulate. We notice thereby that the first step which seemed
to help at the beginning, that epochs through which we freed ourselves from all
objective sciences as grounds of validity, by no means suffices. In carrying out
this epochs, we obviously continue to stand on the ground of the world; it is
now reduced to the life-world which is valid for us prescientifically; it is
just that we may use no sort of knowledge arising from the sciences as premises,
and we may take the sciences into consideration only as historical facts, taking
no position of our own on their truth. But nothing about this affects our interested looking-around in the
prescientifically intuited world or our paying attention to its relative
features. In a certain way, concern with this sort of thing belongs continually
even to [one type of] objective investigation, namely, that of the
historians, who must, after all, reconstruct the changing, surrounding
life-worlds of the peoples and periods with which they deal. In spite of this,
the pregiven world is still valid as a ground [for them] and has not been
transposed into the universe of the purely subjective, a universal framework in
its own right, which is our concern now. The same thing holds [even] if we take as our subject
of investigation, in the unity of a systematic survey, all [historical] periods
and peoples and finally the entire spatiotemporal world, paying constant
attention to the relativity of the surrounding life-worlds of particular human
beings, peoples, and periods as mere matters of fact. It is clear that the same
thing is true of this world survey, in the form of an iterated synthesis of
relative, spatiotemporal life-worlds, that is true of a survey of one such
life-world individually. It is taken one part at a time and then, at a higher
level, one surrounding world, one temporal period, at a time; each particular
intuition [yields] an ontic validity, whether in the mode of actuality or
possibility. As each intuition occurs, it presupposes others having objective
validity -- presupposes for us, the observers, the general ground of the validity
of the world. [148 § 39. The
peculiar character of the transcendental epoche as a total change of the natural
attitude of life. Now,
How can the pregivenness of the
life-world become a universal subject of investigation in its own right?
Clearly, only through a total change of the natural attitude, such that
we no longer live, as heretofore, as human beings within natural existence,
constantly effecting the validity of the pregiven world; rather, we must
constantly deny ourselves this. Only in this way can we arrive at the
transformed and novel subject of investigation, "pregivenness of the world
as such": the world purely and exclusively as-- and in respect to how -- it has
meaning and ontic validity, and continually attains these in new forms, in our
conscious life. Only thus can we study what the world is as the ground-validity
for natural life, with all its projects and undertakings, and,
correlatively, what natural life and its subjectivity ultimately are,
i.e., purely as the subjectivity which functions here in effecting validity. The
life which effects world-validity in natural world-life does not permit of being
studied from within the attitude of natural world-life. What is required, then,
is a total transformation of attitude, a completely unique, universal
epoche. § 40. The
difficulties surrounding the genuine sense of performing the total epoche. The
temptation to misconstrue it as a withholding of all individual validities,
carried out step by step. THE
UNIVERSALITY of the epoche in regard to the totality of natural
and normal life does indeed have an incomparable, peculiar character, and as
such it is at first open to question in [149 In order to gain a conception of how this total
transformation of attitude is to be carried out, let us consider again the
style of natural, normal life. There we move in a current of ever new
experiences, judgments, valuations, decisions. In each of these acts the ego is
directed toward objects in its surrounding world, dealing with them in
one way or another. It is of them that we are conscious in these acts
themselves, sometimes simply as actual, sometimes in modalities of actuality
(for example, as possible, as doubtful, etc. ). None of these acts, and none of
the validities involved in them, is isolated: in their intentions they
necessarily imply an infinite horizon of inactive [inaktuelle] validities
which function with them in flowing mobility. The manifold acquisitions of
earlier active life are not dead sediments; even the background (for example,
that of the perceptual field), of which we are always concurrently conscious but
which is momentarily irrelevant and remains completely unnoticed, still
functions according to its implicit validities. All things of this sort, even
though they are momentarily not actualized, are in a constant motion involving
modes of being awakened, immediately or mediately, and modes of affecting
the ego and possibly passing over into active apperception, intervening as
validities in the complex of acts. Thus the particular object of our active
consciousness, and correlatively the active, conscious having of it, being
directed toward it, and dealing with it -- all this is forever surrounded by an
atmosphere of mute, concealed, but cofunctioning validities, a vital horizon into
which the active ego can also direct itself voluntarily, reactivating old
acquisitions, consciously grasping new apperceptive ideas, transforming them
into intuitions. Because of this constantly flowing horizonal character, then,
every straightforwardly performed validity in natural world-life always
presupposes validities extending back, immediately or mediately, into a
necessary subsoil of obscure but occasionally available reactivatable
validities, all of which together, including the present acts, make up a single
indivisible, interrelated complex of life. This
consideration is of significance for the clarification of [150] how the universal epoche is to be performed. We see,
namely, that as an abstention from performing validity, carried out in
individual steps, it cannot lead to the goal. The abstention from performing individual validities (similar to the
way this occurs in a critical attitude, caused by theoretical or practical
demands) only creates for each instance a new mode of validity on the natural
ground of the world; and the situation is not improved if we wish to exercise,
through an anticipatory, universal resolve, the abstention from the performance,
one by one, of all validities, even to infinity, i.e., in respect to all of
one's own or alien validities which from now on could ever suggest themselves. Instead of this universal abstention in individual steps, a completely
different sort of universal epoche is possible, namely, one which puts out of
action, with one blow, the total performance running through the whole of
natural world-life and through the whole network (whether concealed or open) of
validities-precisely that total performance which, as the coherent
"natural attitude," makes up "simple"
"straightforward" ongoing life. Through the abstention which inhibits
this whole hitherto unbroken way of life a complete transformation of all of
life is attained, a thoroughly new way of life. An attitude is arrived at which
is above the pregivenness of the validity of the world, above the infinite complex whereby, in concealment, the world's validities are
always founded on other validities, above the
whole manifold but synthetically unified flow in which the world has and forever
attains anew its content of meaning and its ontic validity. In other words, we
thus have an attitude above
the universal conscious life (both
individual-subjective and intersubjective) through which the world is
"there" for those naively absorbed in ongoing life, as unquestionably
present, as the universe of what is there,1 as the field of all acquired and
newly established life-interests. They are all put out of action in advance by
the epoche, and with them the whole natural ongoing life which is directed
toward the actualities of "the" world. It is to be noted also that the present, the "transcendental"
epoche is meant, of course, as a habitual attitude which we resolve to take up
once and for all. Thus it is by no means a 1. als fraglos vorhandene, als Universum der
Vorhandenheiten. [151] epoche, in comparing it with
vocational attitudes, still holds during "vocational time," while it
does put all other interests "out of play," it by no means gives up
their manner of being as belonging to us (or our own manner of being as those
who are "interested"), as if we were to sacrifice them or even
reconsider whether or not they should continue to be upheld. But we must also
not forget what was said as a protest against a degrading equation [of this]
with other vocations and what was said about the possibility of radically
changing all human existence through this epoche which reaches into its
philosophical depths. §
41. The genuine transcendental epoche makes
possible the "transcendental reduction"the discovery and
investigation of the transcendental correlation between world and
world-consciousness. WE PERFORM
the epoche--
we who are philosophizing
in a new way-- as a transformation of the attitude which precedes it not
accidentally but essentially, namely, the attitude of natural human existence
which, in its total historicity, in life and science, was never before
interrupted. But it is necessary, now, to make really transparent the fact that
we are not left with a meaningless, habitual abstention; rather, it is through
this abstention that the gaze of the philosopher in truth first becomes fully
free: above all, free of the strongest and most universal, and at the same time
most hidden, internal bond, namely, of the pregivenness of the world. Given in
and through this liberation is the discovery of the universal, absolutely
self-enclosed and absolutely self-sufficient correlation between the world
itself and world-consciousness. By the latter is meant the conscious life of the
subjectivity which effects the validity of the world, the subjectivity
which always has the world in its enduring acquisitions and continues actively
to shape it anew. And there results, finally, taken in the broadest sense,
the absolute correlation between beings of every sort and every meaning, on
the one hand, and absolute subjectivity, as constituting meaning and ontic [152] validity in this broadest manner, on the other hand.
What must be shown in particular and above all is that through the epoche a new
way of experiencing, of thinking, of theorizing, is opened to the philosopher;
here, situated above his own natural being and above the natural world, he loses
nothing of their being and their objective truths and likewise nothing at all of
the spiritual acquisitions of his world-life or those of the whole
historical communal life; he simply forbids himself --as a philosopher, in
the uniqueness of his direction of interest -- to continue the whole natural
performance of his world-life; that is, he forbids himself to ask questions
which rest upon the ground of the world at hand, questions of being, questions
of value, practical questions, questions about being or not-being, about being
valuable, being useful, being beautiful, being good, etc. All natural interests
are put out of play. But the world, exactly as it was for me earlier and still
is, as my world, our world, humanity's world, having validity in its various
subjective ways, has not disappeared; it is just that, during the consistently
carried-out epoche, it is under our gaze purely as the correlate of the
subjectivity which gives it ontic meaning, through whose validities 1 the
world "is" at all. This is not a "view," an
"interpretation" bestowed upon the world. Every view about . . . ,
every opinion about "the" world, has its ground in the pregiven world.
It is from this very ground that I have freed myself through the epoche; I stand
above the world, which has now become for me, in a quite
peculiar sense, a phenomenon. §
42. The task of concretely plotting ways in
which the transcendental reduction can actually be carried out. BUT HOW IS THE indicated accomplishment, made possible by the
epoche-- we call it the "transcendental reduction"- and how is the
scientific task which is thus opened up to be made understandable in more
concrete terms? [We are referring to the] accomplishment of a reduction of
"the" world to the transcendental phenomenon "world," a
reduction thus also to its 1.
Reading Geltungen for Gelten. [153] correlate, transcendental subjectivity, in and through
whose "conscious life" the world, valid for us straightforwardly and
naively prior to all science, attains and always has attained its whole content
and ontic validity. How can we make it more concretely understandable that the
reduction of mankind to the phenomenon "mankind," which is included as
part of the reduction of the world, makes it possible to recognize mankind
as a self-objectification of transcendental subjectivity which is always
functioning ultimately and is thus "absolute"? How does it become
possible, thanks to the epoche, to display this subjectivity in its
accomplishment, in its transcendental "conscious life," extending into
hidden subsoils, in the distinct manners in which it "brings about,"
within itself, the world as ontic meaning? How can we bring this to light with
self-evidence, not inventing or mythically constructing? If this is a matter of
a new sort of scientific discipline, of a new sort of theoretical questioning
and resolving of questions, then the ground for these questions, too, must be
prepared. Natural questions about the world have their ground in the pregiven
world as the world of actual and possible experiences. And the gaze made free by
the epoche must likewise be, in its own way, an experiencing gaze. [But] the
accomplishment of the total transformation of attitude must consist in the
fact that the infinity of actual and possible world-experience transforms itself
into the infinity of actual and possible "transcendental
experience," in which, as a first step, the world and the natural
experience of it are experienced as "phenomenon." But how do we begin this, and how
do we progress? How, at first concretely feeling our way, do we attain our first
results, even if only as material for new reflections through which the method
of systematic progressive work and, at the same time, the genuine and pure sense
of our whole project and the quite peculiar character of this new scientific
discipline will become fully clear? The following reflections will show how much
such material is needed when we no longer move on the old familiar ground of the
world but rather stand, through our transcendental reduction, only at the
gate of entrance to the realm, never before entered, of the "mothers of
knowledge"; 1 they will show how great the temptation is, here,
to misunderstand oneself and how much-- indeed, ultimately, the actual success of
a transcendental philosophy -- depends upon self-reflective clarity carried
to its limits. 1.
Cf. Faust, Part II, line 6216. [154] §43.
Characterization of a new way to the reduction, as contrasted with the
"Cartesian way." WE WISH TO PROCEED, here, by beginning anew, starting purely from
natural world-life, and by asking after the how
of the world's pregivenness. At first we understand the
question of the world's pregivenness just as it arises within the natural
attitude and is understandable by all: namely, as the pregivenness of the
world of existing things through the constant alteration of relative
manners of givenness, the world just as it essentially, always, obviously exists
for us, throughout the whole of naturally flowing life, with an inexhaustible
plenitude of what is taken for granted and constantly underlies the alteration
of subjective appearances and validities. As such we now consistently make
the world our subject of investigation, i.e., as the ground of all our interests
and life-projects, among which the theoretical projects of the objective
sciences make up only a particular group. But the latter is now to be in no way
privileged as it was when it motivated our inquiries earlier. In this manner,
then, let our subject now be not the world simply, but the world exclusively as
it is constantly pregiven to us in the alteration of its manners of givenness. At this point novel and ever broadening systematic tasks are opened up within a universal epoche which at first offers itself quite obviously as an immediate necessity. In systematically carrying out the epoche, or reduction, understood in this way, however, we find that in all the tasks it sets it requires a clarification and a transformation of its meaning if the new science is to become capable of being executed in a really concrete way and without absurdity; or if-what amounts to the same thing-it is actually to accomplish a reduction to the absolutely ultimate grounds [Gründe] and to avoid unnoticed, nonsensical admixtures of naturally naive prior validities. Thus we arrive once again at the transcendental epoche which was introduced in advance in our previous presentation in a general way. But now it has not only been enriched by the samples of significant insights attained along the way; it has also attained a self-under [155 standing in principle which
procures for these insights and for the epoche itself their ultimate meaning and
value. I note in passing that the much shorter way to the transcendental epoche in my Ideas toward a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, which I call the "Cartesian way" (since it is thought of as being attained merely by reflectively engrossing oneself in the Cartesian epoche of the Meditations while critically purifying it of Descartes's prejudices and confusions), has a great shortcoming: while it leads to the transcendental ego in one leap, as it were, it brings this ego into view as apparently empty of content, since there can be no preparatory explication; so one is at a loss, at first, to know what has been gained by it, much less how, starting with this, a completely new sort of fundamental science, decisive for philosophy, has been attained. Hence also, as the reception of my Ideas showed, it is all too easy right at the very beginning to fall back into the naive-natural attitude-- something that is very tempting in any case.1 § 44. The
life-world as subject matter for a theoretical interest determined by a
universal epoche in respect to the actuality of the things of the life-world. LET US BEGIN our new way by devoting an exclusive, consistently
theoretical interest to the "life-world" as the general
"ground" of human world-life and, specifically, to just the way in
which it fulfills this general "ground" function. Since we seek in
vain in world literature for investigations that could serve as preparatory
studies for us-investigations which might have understood this task as that
of a science in its own right (a peculiar science, to be sure, since it concerns
the disparaged doxa, which now suddenly claims the dignity of a foundation for
science, 1.
It
is to be remembered that the German version of the Cartesian
Meditations had never been released for publication by Husserl.
These
remarks support the theory that Husserl had given up the project of a final version of the Meditations
altogether in favor of the Crisis
as the definitive introduction to phenomenology. [156] episteme)--we ourselves must make a completely new beginning. As is the
case with all undertakings which are new in principle, for which not even an
analogy can serve as guide, this beginning takes place with a certain
unavoidable naïveté. In the beginning is the deed.1 It makes the still insecure
project more definite and at the same time clearer and clearer by means of
samples of successful execution. After this, reflection on method is
required (as the second step) which expressly delimits the general sense of such
a project, the extent to which it can be fulfilled, and the scope of what has
already been accomplished in aspiring to it. We wish, then, to consider the
surrounding life-world concretely, in its neglected relativity and
according to all the manners of relativity belonging essentially to it-the
world in which we live intuitively, together with its real entities [Realitäten]; but [we wish to consider them] as they
give themselves to us at first in straightforward experience, and even
[consider] the ways in which their validity is sometimes in suspense (between
being and illusion, etc. ). Our exclusive task shall be to comprehend precisely
this style, precisely this whole merely subjective and apparently
incomprehensible "Heraclitean flux." Thus we are not concerned with
whether and what the things, the real entities of the world, actually are (their
being actual, their actually being such and such, according to properties,
relations, interconnections, etc.); we are also not concerned with what the
world, taken as a totality, actually is, what in general belongs to it in the
way of a priori structural lawfulness or factual "natural laws." We
have nothing like this as our subject matter. Thus we exclude all knowledge, all
statements about true being and predicative truths for it, such as are required
in active life for its praxis (i.e., situational truths); but we also exclude
all sciences, genuine as well as pseudosciences, with their knowledge of the
world as it is "in itself," in "objective truth." Naturally,
in the present thematic sphere, we also take no part in all the interests which
set any kind of human praxis in motion, especially since the latter, because of
its rootedness in the already existing world, is always at the same time
interested in the true existence or the nonexistence of the things with which it
deals. This involves a type of universal epoche, then, which serves here only to
isolate the subject matter of subsequent investigations, of whose possible
results, by the way, we still have no conception. The motivation arising out of
the need to clarify the 1.
Faust,
Part I, line 1237: "Im Anfang war die Tat." [157] obvious accomplishments of the positive sciences
originally required this topic. But we have already detached ourselves from
this motivation. Deeper reflections are required in order to understand how
this topic can become an independent task, a field of working problems. §
45. Beginnings of a concrete
exposition of what is given in sense-intuition purely as such. ONE OF OUR FIRST steps will have ,to be that of filling in the empty
generality of our theme. As fully "disinterested" 1 spectators
(in the indicated sense of the epoche) of the world For example, there are various
individual things of experience at any given time; I focus on one of them.
To perceive it, even if it is perceived as remaining completely unchanged, is
something very complex: it is to
see it, to touch it, to smell it, to hear it, etc.; and in each case I have
something different. What is seen in seeing is in and for itself other than what
is touched in touching. But in spite of this I say: it is the same thing; it is
only the manners of its sensible exhibition, of course, that are different.
If I remain purely within the realm of seeing, I find new differences, arising
in very manifold form in the course of any normal seeing, which, after all, is a
continuous process; each phase is itself a seeing, but actually what is seen in
each one is something different. I express this somewhat in the following way:
the pure thing seen, what is visible "of" the thing, is first of all a
surface, and in the changing course of seeing I see it now from this
"side," now from that, continuously perceiving it from ever differing
sides. But in them the
surface exhibits itself to me in a continuous
synthesis; each side is for consciousness a manner 1. Reading uninteressierte
for uninteressierter. [158] of exhibition
of it. This implies that, while the
surface is immediately given, I mean more than it offers. Indeed, I have ontic
certainty of this thing [as that] to which all the sides at once belong, and in
the mode in which I see it "best." Each side gives me something o f
the seen thing. In the continuous alteration of seeing, the side just seen 2
ceases being actually still seen, but it is
"retained" and "taken" together with those retained from
before; and thus I "get to know" the thing. Similar observations
should be developed at length in respect to nearness and farness. Even if I stop at perception, I
still have the full consciousness of the thing, just as I already have it
at the first glance when I see it as this thing. In seeing I always
"mean" it with all the sides which are in no way given to me, not even
in the form of intuitive, anticipatory presentifications. Thus every perception
has, "for consciousness," a horizon
belonging to its object (i.e., whatever is meant in the
perception). But considered more exactly, what
we have displayed so far, i.e., what I attribute to the thing itself-for
example, its seen, colored shape in the alteration of near-and-far
orientation--is again something which exhibits itself in manifold ways. I am
speaking now of the alteration of perspectives. The perspectives of the shape and also of its color are
different, but each is in this new way an exhibiting
of -- of this shape, of this color. Something similar
to this can be studied in every modality of the sense-perception (touching,
hearing, etc.) o f the same thing. In the course of alteration they all play their role as
exhibitings, now being interrupted, now beginning again; they offer many types
of manifolds of exhibitings, appearances, each of which functions precisely as
an exhibiting of. In running their course they function in such a way as to form a
sometimes continuous and sometimes discrete synthesis of identification or,
better, of unification. This happens not as a blending of externals; rather, as bearers of
"sense" in each phase, as meaning something, the perspectives combine
in an advancing enrichment o
f meaning
and a continuing
development o f meaning,
such that what no longer appears is still valid as
retained and such that the prior meaning which anticipates a continuous flow,
the expectation of "what is to come," is straightway fulfilled and
more closely determined. Thus everything is taken up into the unity of
validity or into the one, the thing.
For now, this rough beginning of a description must suffice. 2.
Reading die
eben
gesehene for eben
die
gesehene. [159] § 46.
The universal a priori of correlation. AS SOON AS WE BEGIN to be on the lookout for things or objects in the
life-world, not in order to know them as what they [really] are but rather in
order to inquire into the modes of their subjective manners of givenness, i.e.,
into how an object-in our example a perceived object-exhibits itself as being
and beingsuch, we enter a realm of more and more involved and very
remarkable expositions. Ordinarily we notice nothing of the whole subjective
character of the manners of exhibiting "of" the things, but in
reflection we recognize with astonishment that essential correlations obtain
here which are the component parts of a farther-reaching, universal a priori.
And what remarkable "implications" appear, ones that can even be quite
immediately, descriptively displayed. As it was already pointed out briefly
above: I am directly conscious of the thing existing there, yet changing from
moment to moment I have the experience [Erlebnis] [of
an] "exhibiting of," although the latter, with its remarkable
"of," becomes visible only in reflection. Implied in the particular
perception of the thing is a whole "horizon" of nonactive [nichtaktuelle]
and yet cofunctioning manners of appearance
and syntheses of validity. Every first description here is of
necessity rough, and soon one is faced with the enigmas caused by this
implication of nonactive manifolds of appearances, without which no things, no
world of experience, would be given to us. And soon we are also faced with the
difficulties of concretely unfolding this a priori of correlation. The latter
can be displayed only in relativity, in an unfolding of horizons in which
one soon realizes that unnoticed limitations, horizons which have not
been felt, push us on to inquire into new correlations inseparably bound up with
those already displayed. For example, we involuntarily begin such an
"intentional analysis" of perception by giving privileged status to a
thing at rest, remaining qualitatively unchanged. But the things of the
perceptual surrounding world give themselves only temporarily in this way, and
soon the intentional problem of motion and change arises. But was such a
beginning, with the unchanged thing at rest, actually only accidental? Does the
privileged status of rest not itself have a motive in the necessary [160] course of such investigations? Or,
to look at the matter from another and very important side: involuntarily, we
began with the intentional analysis of perception (purely as perception of its
perceived object) and in fact gave privileged status thereby to intuitively
given bodies. Might this not also point to essential necessities? The
world exists as a temporal, a spatiotemporal, world in which each thing has its
bodily extension and duration and, again in respect to these, its position in
universal time and in space. It is as such that we are ever conscious of the
world in waking consciousness, as such that it is valid as universal horizon.
Perception is related only to the present.
But this present is always meant as having an endless past behind
it and an open future before it. We soon see that we need the intentional
analysis of recollection as the original manner of being conscious of the
past; but we also see that such an analysis presupposes in principle that of
perception, since memory, curiously enough, implies having-perceived. If we
consider perception abstractly, by itself, we find its intentional
accomplishment to be presentation, making something present: the object
gives itself as "there," originally there, present. But in this
presence, as that of an extended and enduring object, lies a continuity of what
I am still conscious of, what has flowed away and is no longer intuited at all,
a continuity of "retentions"-and, in the other direction, a continuity
of "protentions." Yet this is not, like memory in the usual sense of
intuitive "recollection," a phenomenon which openly, so to speak,
plays a part in object- and world-apperception. And thus the different
modes of presentification in general enter into the universal investigation we
are undertaking here, namely, that of inquiring consistently and exclusively
after the how of the world's manner of givenness, its open or implicit
"intentionalities." In displaying these, we must say to ourselves
again and again that without them the objects and the world would not be there
for us and that the former exist for us only with the meaning and the mode of
being that they receive in constantly arising or having arisen out of those
subjective accomplishments. [161] §47.
Indication of further directions of inquiry: the basic subjective
phenomena of kinesthesis, alteration of validity, horizon-consciousness, and the
communalization of experience. BUT FIRST IT WILL be necessary to continue our groping entrance into this
unknown realm of subjective phenomena and to carry out several further
expositions, which will be understandably still rough and in many respects
still imperfectly determined. Let us again give a privileged status to
perception. Previously our gaze was directed at the multiplicity of side-exhibitings
of one and the same thing and to the alteration of near and far perspectives. We
soon note that these systems of "exhibiting of" are related back
to correlative multiplicities of kinesthetic processes having the peculiar
character of the "I do," "I move" (to which even the "I
hold still" must be added). The kinestheses are different from the
movements of the living body which exhibit themselves merely as those of a
physical body, yet they are somehow one with them, belonging to one's own living
body with its two-sided character (internal kinestheses, external physical-real
movements). If we inquire into this "belonging," we notice that
in each case "my living body" requires particular and extensive
descriptions, that it has its special peculiarities in the manner of
exhibiting itself in multiplicities. Another extraordinarily important
thematic direction has not yet been named; it is characterized by the phenomenon
of the alteration of validity -- for example, the alteration of being into
illusion. In continuous perception a thing is there for me in the
straightforward ontic certainty of immediate presence - though I must add:
normally; for only when, giving my kinestheses free play, I experience
concurrent exhibitings as belonging to it is the consciousness sustained of
the one thing in actual presence, exhibiting itself in manifold fashion as
itself. But if I ask what is implied in the fact that the thing-exhibitings
belong to the altering kinestheses, I recognize that a hidden intentional
"if-then" relation is at work here: the exhibitings must occur in a
certain systematic order; it is in this way that they are indicated in advance,
in expectation, in the course of a [162] harmonious perception. The actual kinestheses here lie
within the system of kinesthetic capacity, which is correlated with the
system of possible following events harmoniously belonging to it. This is, then,
the intentional background of every straightforward ontic certainty of a
presented thing.1 Often, however, a break in this harmony occurs: being is transformed into
illusion or simply into being doubtful, being merely possible, being probable,
being after all not completely illusory, etc. The illusion is undone through
"correction," through changing the sense in which the thing had been
perceived. It is easy to see that the change of apperceptive sense takes
place through a change of the expectation-horizon of the multiplicities
anticipated as normal (i.e., as running on harmoniously). For example, one
saw a man, but then, upon touching him, had to reinterpret him as a mannequin
(exhibiting itself visually as a man). When our interest is turned in this direction, unexpectedly manifold
phenomena can be noticed in every perception, and not only in connection with
the individual thing. For consciousness the individual thing is not alone; the
perception of a thing is perception of it within a perceptual
field. And just as the individual
thing in perception has meaning only through an open horizon of "possible
perceptions," insofar as what is actually perceived "points"
to a systematic multiplicity of all possible perceptual exhibitings belonging to
it harmoniously, so the thing has yet another horizon: besides this
"internal horizon" it has an "external horizon" precisely as
a thing within a field o f things; and this points finally to the whole "world as perceptual
world." The thing is one out of the total group of simultaneously actually
perceived things; but this group is not, for us, for consciousness, the world;
rather, the world exhibits itself in it; such a group, as the momentary field of
perception, always has the character for us of a sector"”of
“ the world, of the universe of things for possible perceptions. Such,
then, at any time, is the present world; it exhibits itself to me in every case
through a nucleus of "original presence" (this designates the
continuously subjective character of what is directly perceived as such) as well
as through its internal and external horizon-validities. In
our -- or, for each of us, my2 -- waking life, the world
is 1. Cf. the similar passage on pp. 106
f., above. 2.
in
unserem, je-meinem - a very
Heideggerian turn of phrase. [163] always perceived in this way; it always flows on in the
unity of my perceptual conscious life; yet it does so in remarkable fashion,
such that, in individual details, a harmonious flow of the preindicated
multiplicities, which results in the consciousness of the straightforward
existence of the thing in question, does not always occur. Ontic certainty,
which involves an anticipatory certainty of bringing the appropriate
multiplicities harmoniously into a fulfilling flow in the course of further
perception through a voluntary direction of the kinestheses, is often not
sustained; and yet a harmony in the total perception of the world is always sustained through a correction
which actually constantly functions along with it. This includes, for
example, the correction involved in seeing something close up, whereby what was
seen from afar is determined more precisely and thus at the same time corrected
(e.g., what was an undifferentiated red at a distance shows itself from close up
to be spotted). But instead of inquiring further in the sphere of our own intuitions, let
us turn our attention to the fact that in our continuously flowing
world-perceiving we are not isolated but rather have, within it, contact with
other human beings. Each one has his perceptions, his presentifications, his
harmonious experiences, devaluation of his certainties into mere
possibilities, doubts, questions, illusions. But in lining
with one another each one can take part in the life
of the others. Thus in general the world exists not only for isolated men but
for the community of men; and this is due to the fact that even what is
straightforwardly perceptual is communalized. In this communalization, too, there constantly occurs an alteration of
validity through reciprocal correction. In reciprocal understanding, my
experiences and experiential acquisitions enter into contact with those of
others, similar to the contact between individual series of experiences within
my (one's own) experiential life; and here again, for the most part, intersubjective
harmony of validity occurs, [establishing what is] "normal" in respect
to particular details, and thus an intersubjective unity also comes about in the
multiplicity of validities and of what is valid through them; here again,
furthermore, intersubjective discrepancies show themselves often enough; but
then, whether it is unspoken and even unnoticed, or is expressed through
discussion and criticism, a unification is brought about or at least is certain
in advance as possibly attainable by everyone. All this takes place in such a
way that in the consciousness of each [164] individual, and in the overarching community
consciousness which has grown up through [social] contact, one and the same
world achieves and continuously maintains constant validity as the world which
is in part already experienced and in part the open horizon of possible
experiences for all; it is the world as the universal horizon, common to all
men, of actually existing things. Each individual, as a subject of possible
experiences, has his experiences, his aspects, his perceptual interconnections,
his alteration of validity, his corrections, etc.; and each particular social
group has its communal aspects, etc. Here again, properly speaking, each
individual has his experienced things, that is, if we understand by this what in
particular is valid for him, what is seen by him and, through the seeing, is
experienced as straightforwardly existing and being-such. But each
individual "knows" himself to be living within the horizon of his
fellow human beings, with whom he can enter into sometimes actual, sometimes
potential contact, as they also can do (as he likewise knows) in actual and
potential living together. He knows that he and his fellows, in their actual
contact, are related to the same experienced things in such a way that each
individual has different aspects, different sides, perspectives, etc., of
them but that in each case these are taken from the same total system of multiplicities
of which each individual is constantly conscious (in the actual experience of
the same thing) as the horizon of possible experience of this thing. If one
attends to the distinction between things as "originally one's
own" and as "empathized" from others, in respect to the how of
the manners of appearance, and if one attends to the possibility of
discrepancies between one's own and empathized views, then what one actually
experiences originaliter as a perceptual thing is transformed, for each of us, into a mere
"representation of" ["Vorstellung
von"], "appearance of," the one objectively existing thing. From
the synthesis these have taken on precisely the new sense "appearance
of," and as such they are henceforth valid. "The" thing itself is
actually that which no one experiences as really seen, since it is always in
motion, always, and for everyone, a unity for consciousness of the openly
endless multiplicity of changing experiences and experienced things, one's
own and those of others. The cosubjects of this experience themselves make up,
for me and for one another, an openly endless horizon of human beings who are
capable of meeting and then entering into actual contact with me and with
one another. [165] §48. Anything
that is-whatever its meaning and to whatever region it belongs-is an index of a
subjective system of correlations. IN THIS EXCLUSIVE concentration on the multiplicities of subjective
manners of appearing through which the world is pregiven to us, we arrive, again
and again-even though we have really considered only the world of perception,
indeed only its corporeal features-at the insight that we are not dealing merely
with contingent matters of fact. Rather, no conceivable human being, no matter
how different we imagine him to be, could ever experience a world in manners of
givenness which differ from the incessantly mobile relativity we have delineated
in general terms, i.e., as a world pregiven to him in his conscious life and in
community with fellow human beings. The fact which is naively taken for granted,
that each person sees things and the world in general as they appear to him,
concealed, as we now realize, a great horizon of remarkable truths whose uniqueness
and systematic interconnection never entered the philosophical purview. The
correlation between world (the world of which we always speak) and its
subjective manners of givenness never evoked philosophical wonder (that is,
prior to the first breakthrough of "transcendental phenomenology" in
the Logical Investigations), in
spite of the fact that it had made itself felt even in pre-Socratic philosophy
and among the Sophists - though here only as a motive for skeptical
argumentation. This correlation never aroused a philosophical interest of its
own which could have made it the object of an appropriate scientific attitude.
Philosophers were confined by what was taken for granted, i.e., that each thing
appeared differently in each case to each person. But as soon as we begin to examine
carefully the how of the appearance of a thing in its actual and possible alteration and to
pay consistent attention to the correlation it involves between appearance and that which appears as such, and if we consider the alteration as an alteration of
validity for the intentionality occurring in the ego-subjects and their
communalization, we are [166] forced to recognize a fixed typology with ever widening
ramifications. It applies not only to perceiving, to bodies, and to the
penetrable depths of immediate sensibility but to any and every entity within
the spatiotemporal world and to its subjective manners of givenness.
Everything thus stands in correlation with its own manners of givenness, which
are by no means merely sensible in character, within a possible experience;
and everything has its modes of validity and its particular manners of
synthesis. Experience, self-evidence, is not an empty generality but is
differentiated according to the species, genera, and regional categories of
what is and also according to all spatiotemporal modalities. Whatever
exists, whether it has a concrete or abstract, real or ideal, meaning, has its
manners of self-givenness and, on the side of the ego, its manners of intention
in modes of validity; to this belong the manners of the subjective variation of
these modes in syntheses of individual-subjective and intersubjective harmony
and discrepancy. We also foresee (as even the first trials made clear in a
preliminary way) that this confusingly manifold typology of correlations,
comprising further differentiations at every turn, is not a mere though
generally established fact but rather that the factual indicates an essential
necessity which, with the proper method, can be translated into essential
generalities, into an immense system of novel and highly astounding a
priori truths. No matter where we turn, every entity that is valid for me and
every conceivable subject as existing in actuality is thus correlatively-and
with essential necessity-an index of its systematic multiplicities. Each one
indicates an ideal general set of actual and possible experiential manners of
givenness, each of which is an appearance of this one entity, such that
every actual concrete experience brings about, from this total multiplicity, a
harmonious flow of manners of givenness which continuously fulfills the
experiencing intention. *
The first breakthrough of this universal a priori of correlation between
experienced object and manners of givenness (which occurred during work on
my Logical
Investigations around 1898) affected me so deeply that my whole
subsequent life-work has been dominated by the task of systematically
elaborating on this a priori of correlation. The further course of the
reflections in this text will show how, when human subjectivity was brought into
the problems of correlation, a radical transformation of the meaning of these
problems became necessary which finally led to the phenomenological reduction to
absolute, transcendental subjectivity. The
first, though still unclarified, emergence of the phenomenological
reduction occurred several years after the publication of the Logical
Investigations (1900-1901); the first attempt at a systematic introduction to the
new philosophy of the transcendental reduction appeared in 1913 as a fragment
(Volume I of Ideas toward a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy). Contemporary
philosophy of the decades since then-- even that of the so-called phenomenological
schools -- preferred to persist in the old philosophical naïveté. To be sure, the
first breakthroughs of such a radical change, a total transformation of the
whole natural manner of life, were difficult to present adequately, especially
since certain considerations, which will become understandable in the following,
constantly give rise to misinterpretations resulting from relapses into the
natural attitude. [167] The total multiplicity of manners
of givenness, however, is a horizon of possibly realizable processes, as opposed
to the actual process, and as such it belongs to each experience, or rather to
the intention which is operative within it. For each subject this intention is
the cogito; the manners of givenness (understood in the widest sense) make up
its cogitatum according to the "what" and the "how," and the
manners of givenness in turn bring to "exhibition" the one and the
same entity which is their unity. § 49. Preliminary
concept of transcendental constitution as "original formation of
meaning." The restricted character of the exemplary analyses carried out so
far; an indication of further horizons of exposition. WE SEE HOW FAR we must take all this when we realize that, while we are dealing with the
total intentional accomplishment, having many levels, of the subjectivity
in question, it is not that of the isolated subject. We are dealing, rather,
with the entire intersubjectivity which is brought together in the accomplishment-and
here the concepts of "what is," of "manners of givenness,"
of "syntheses," etc., are repeatedly relativized. Again and again we
realize that, beginning with the superficially visible, the manners of
appearing belonging to the unifying multiplicities are themselves unities
of multiplicities which lie deeper and which constitute them through
appearances, so that we are led back to an obscure horizon-which, however, can
still be [168] opened up through methodical
regressive inquiry. All the levels and strata through which the syntheses,
intentionally overlapping as they are from subject to subject, are
interwoven form a universal unity of synthesis; through it the objective
universe comes to be -- the world which is and as it is concretely and vividly
given (and pregiven for all possible praxis). In this regard we speak of the
"intersubjective constitution" of the world, meaning by this the total
system of manners of givenness, however hidden, and also of modes of
validity for egos; through this constitution, if we systematically uncover it,
the world as it is for us becomes understandable as a structure of meaning
formed out of elementary intentionalities. The being of these intentionalities
themselves is nothing but one meaningformation operating together with
another, "constituting" new meaning through synthesis. And meaning is
never anything but meaning in modes of validity, that is, as related to
intending ego-subjects which effect validity. Intentionality is the title which
stands for the only actual and genuine way of explaining, making intelligible.
To go back to the intentional origins and unities of the formation of meaning is
to proceed toward a comprehension which, once achieved (which is of course an
ideal case), would leave no meaningful question unanswered. But every serious
and genuine move from a "ready-made entity" back to its intentional
origins gives us, in respect to those strata already uncovered and the
clarification of what is accomplished in them, an understanding which, though
merely relative, is yet an actual understanding as far as it goes. What we dealt with in the manner of examples was naturally only a
beginning, in fact a beginning of the clarification of merely the world of
perception, which is itself, taken as a whole, only a "stratum." The
world is a spatiotemporal world; spatiotemporality (as "living,"
not as logicomathematical) belongs to its own ontic meaning as life-world. Our
focus on the world of perception (and it is no accident that we begin here)
gives us, as far as the world is concerned, only the temporal mode of the
present; this mode itself points to its horizons, the temporal modes of past and
future. Recollection, above all, exercises the intentional function of forming
the meaning of the past -- apart from the fact that perception itself, as the
"flowing-static" present, is constituted only through the fact
that the static "now" (as a deeper intentional analysis shows) has a
horizon with two differently structured sides, known in intentional language as
a continuum of retentions and protentions. These first prefigurations [169] of temporalization and time,
however, remain in the background. In the recollection founded upon them we
have before us, in original intuition, a past -- a present which has passed. It too
has "being": it has its multiplicities of manners of givenness, its
manners of coming to original self-givenness (to immediate self-evidence) as
what has passed. Likewise, in expectation or anticipatory recollection, again
understood as an intentional modification of perception (the future is a
present-to-come), is found the meaning-formation from which arises the ontic
meaning of that which is in the future. And the deeper structure of this
can be revealed in more detail. This represents the beginnings of new
dimensions of temporalization, or of time and its time content -- quite apart from
the fact (which is not to be elucidated here) that the constitution of every
level and sort of entity is a temporalization which gives to each distinctive
meaning of an entity in the constitutive system its own temporal form,
whereas only through the all-inclusive, universal synthesis which constitutes
the world do all these times come together synthetically into the unity of one
time. One thing more should be pointed out : in the elucidation of the
accomplishment of the intentional syntheses, privileged status is given to the
clarification of the syntheses of continuity (for example, the one contained
in the flowing unity of perception); these serve as a ground for elucidating on
a higher level the discrete syntheses. I give as an example [of the latter] the
identification of something perceived as the same thing that, according to
recollection, was there before. This rerecognition, its exposition through the
continuity of recollection, the corresponding deeper analyses of these
"obvious" matters -- all this leads to difficult investigations. Here, as everywhere, we can investigate first only what is nearest to our
comprehension. But it should be clear from the preceding that as soon as one has
progressed far enough in the reorientation of the epoche to see the purely
subjective in its own self-enclosed pure context as intentionality and to
recognize it as the function of forming ontic meaning, the theoretical interest
grows quickly, and one becomes more astonished at each step by the endless array
of emerging problems and important discoveries to be made. To be sure, one
is soon beset by extraordinary difficulties: that of preserving the pure frame
of mind, of finding one's way in an unknown world, where all the concepts, all
the ways of thinking and scientific methods based on the natural world, as well
as all the logical methods of objective
science, are of no help; and that of bringing about a novel and yet scientific [170] way of thinking through the
required method which is developing in a precursory way. In truth, this is
a whole world-and if we could equate this subjectivity with the yuc»
of
Heraclitus, his saying would doubtless be true of it: "You will never find
the boundaries of the soul, even if you follow every road; so deep is its
ground."' Indeed, every "ground" [Grund] that is reached points to further
grounds, every horizon opened up awakens new horizons, and yet the endless
whole, in its infinity of flowing movement, is oriented toward the unity of one
meaning; not, of course, in such a way that we could ever simply grasp and
understand the whole; rather, as soon as one has fairly well mastered the
universal form of meaning-formation, the breadths and depths of this total
meaning, in its infinite totality, take on valuative [axiotische] dimensions: there arise problems of the totality as that of a universal
reason. Yet all this is far from the beginner; he starts by exhibiting only a
few interconnections, and only gradually does he learn to discover the essential
order of the work to be done or (what amounts to the same thing) to do justice
to those important considerations which, in the course of exhibiting and
describing, are belatedly recognized as determining everything else. Here
we can only sketch them in broad outlines. § 50. First
ordering of all working problems under the headings ego-cogito-cogitatum. WHEN
WE TAKE AN INTEREST in the subjective-relative
life-world, what first arrests our gaze is, naturally: appearance and that which
appears; and we remain at first in the sphere of the intuitively given, i.e.,
the sphere of the modes of experience. The nonintuitive manners of being
conscious and their relatedness back to possibilities of intuition remain
unconsidered. So we pursue the synthesis through which the manifold appearances
bear within themselves "that which is" as their "objectpole."
The latter is in the appearances not as a component part 1.Husserl
slightly
misquotes Diels's version of Fragment 45: the last phrase reads "so tiefen
Sinn
hat sie"
(rather
than Grund).
Cf.
Die
Fragmente
der Vorsokratiker,
ed.
W. Kranz,
12th
ed. (Dublin and Zurich: Weidman, 1966), p. 161. [171] [reell] but intentionally, as that o f which each, in its own way, is an
appearance. A thing, for example, in the harmonious synthesis of
unification, is just this one thing, showing itself one side at a time,
revealing its identical being through its properties, which are exhibited in
different perspectives. In terms of intentionality, anything
straightforwardly experienced as a "thishere," as a thing, is an
index of its manners of appearing, which become intuitable (or experienceable,
in their own peculiar way) when our gaze is reflectively turned. All the above
considerations, of course, touch upon the ego in passing, but the ego
ultimately claims its right as the subject matter of a far-reaching
investigation in its own right, namely, as the performer (also identical, in its own way) o f all validities, the intending ego, directed toward the unity-pole "through" the
alterations of the many-leveled manners of appearing. That is, it is directed toward
its sought-after goal (its project [Vorhabe]), which is meant in advance with
greater or less clarity and distinctness, which fulfills itself, being and
becoming, phase by phase -- fulfilling the ego's intention. At the same time the
ego-- as the ego-pole -- continuously carries out a retaining function such Accordingly we have, in the
Cartesian manner of speaking, the three headings, ego-cogitatio-cogitata: the
ego-pole (and what is peculiar to its identity), the subjective, as appearance tied together synthetically, and
the object-poles. These are different directions our analyses can take, and
to them correspond different aspects of the general notion of intentionality:
direction toward something, appearance of something, and something, an
objective something, as the unity in its appearances toward which the intention of the ego-pole,
through these appearances, is directed. Although these headings are
inseparable from one another, one must pursue them one at a time and in an order opposite to that suggested by the Cartesian
approach. First comes the straightforwardly given life-world, taken initially as
it is given perceptually: as "normal," simply there, unbroken, existing
in pure ontic certainty (undoubted). When the new direction of interest is
established, and thus also its strict epoche, the life-world becomes a first
intentional heading, an index or guideline for inquiring back into the multiplicities of manners of appearing and
their intentional structures. A further shift of direction, at the second level
of reflection, leads to the ego-pole and what is peculiar to its identity. Let
us here point out only what is most important, the most general aspect of the
ego's form, namely, the peculiar temporalization by which it becomes an enduring
ego, constituting itself in its time-modalities: the same ego, now actually
present, is in a sense, in every past that belongs to it, another-i.e., as that
which was and thus is not now-and yet, in the continuity of its time it is one
and the same, which is and was and has its future before it. The ego which is
present now, thus temporalized, has contact with its past ego, even though the
latter is precisely no longer present: it can have a dialogue with it and
criticize it, as it can others. Now everything becomes complicated as soon as we consider that
subjectivity is what it is-an ego functioning constitutively -only within
intersubjectivity. From the "ego" perspective this means that there are new themes, those of the synthesis
applying specifically to ego and other-ego (each taken purely as ego) the
I-you-synthesis and, also, the more complicated we-synthesis. In a certain sense
this is also a temporalization, namely, that of the simultaneity of the
ego-poles or, what amounts to the same thing, that of the constitution of the
personal horizon (pure ego-horizon) in which every ego knows itself to be. It is
universal sociality (in this sense, "mankind"), the "space"
of all ego-subjects. But the synthesis of intersubjectivity, of course,
covers everything else as well: the intersubjectively identical lifeworld-for-all
serves as an intentional "index" for the multiplicities of
appearance, combined in intersubjective synthesis, through which all
ego-subjects (and not merely each through the multiplicities which are peculiar
to him individually) are oriented toward a common world and the things in
it, the field of all the activities united in the general "we," etc.
[173] §
51. The task of an "ontology of the life-world."
BUT all
this -- and this is what makes
scientific discipline, description, phenomenological –transcendental
truth possible -- is pervaded by a set of fixed types which, as we have
said, is one of essential types' and can be methodically encompassed as a pure a
priori. Here it is remarkable, and philosophically very important, that this
also applies to the first of our topics, the life-world, constituted throughout
all its relative aspects as a unity, the universe of life-world objects. Even
without any transcendental interest-that is, within the "natural
attitude" (in the language of transcendental philosophy the naive attitude,
prior to the epoche)-the life-world could have become the subject matter of a
science of its own, an ontology of the life-world purely as experiential world
(i.e., as the world which is coherently, consistently, harmoniously
intuitable in actual and possible experiencing intuition). For our part we,
who up to now have constantly carried out our systematic reflections within the
reorientation of the transcendental epoche, can at any time restore the
natural attitude and, within it, inquire after the invariant structures of the
life-world. The
world of life, which as a matter of course takes up into itself all practical
structures (even those of the objective sciences as cultural facts, though
we refrain from taking part in their interests), is, to be sure, related to
subjectivity throughout the constant alteration of its relative aspects. But
however it changes and however it may be corrected, it holds to its essentially
lawful set of types, to which all life, and thus all science, of which it is the
"ground," remain bound. Thus it also has an ontology to be derived
from pure self-evidence. We
have already spoken of the possibility and the significance of such an
ontology of the life-world on the natural ground, i.e., outside the
transcendental horizon of interest, and we shall have occasion to speak of it
again in another connection. We must keep firmly in mind the fact that this
ontology's own sense of an a priori science contrasts sharply with that of the
tradition. We must never ignore the fact that modern philosophy, with its
objective sciences, is guided by a constructive concept of a world which is true
in itself, one substructed in [174] mathematical form,
at least in respect to nature. Modern philosophy's concept of an a priori
science, which is ultimately a universal mathematics (logic, logistic), cannot
therefore have the dignity of actual self-evidence, i.e., the dignity of
essential insight obtained from direct self-giving (experiencing intuition),
much as it would like to claim this for itself. If
we return again, after this reminder, to the transcendental attitude, i.e., the
epoche, the life-world transforms itself, within our
transcendental-philosophical framework, into the mere tran scendental
"phenomenon." It remains thereby in its own essence what it was
before, but now it proves to be a mere "component," so to speak,
within concrete transcendental subjectivity; and correspondingly its a priori
shows itself to be a "stratum" within the universal a priori of the
transcendental [in general]. To be sure, words taken from the sphere of the
natural world, such as "component" and "stratum," are
dangerous, and the necessary transformation of their sense must therefore be
noticed. Within the epoche we are free consistently to direct our gaze
exclusively at this life-world or at its a priori essential forms; on the other
hand, by correspondingly shifting our gaze we can direct it at the correlates
which constitute its "things" or thing-forms, i.e., at the
multiplicities of manners of givenness and their correlative essential
forms. Further, we can also consider the subjects and communities of subjects,
which function in all this, with regard to the essential ego-forms belonging to
them. In the alteration of these partial attitudes, which are founded upon one
another -- whereby the attitude focused upon life-world phenomena serves as
point of departure, namely, as transcendental guideline for correlative
attitudes on higher levels -- the universal task of inquiry, that of the
transcendental reduction, is brought to realization. § 52.
The emergence of paradoxical enigmas. The necessity of new radical
reflections. THE FIRST
SURVEY of the pure problems of
correlation, which opened up to us the reorientation from the life of natural
interest in the world into the attitude of the "disinterested"
spectator, has resulted, though with a certain naivete and thus [175]
preliminarily, in an abundance of obviously very strange insights which, if they were perfectly secured methodically, would imply a radical reshaping of our whole way of looking at the world. For purposes of thus securing our method, a reflection is required concerning the ground of ultimate presuppositions in which all these problems are rooted and from which, then, their theoretical decisions ultimately take their meaning. But immediately we become involved in great difficulties, in unexpected and at first insoluble paradoxes, which place our whole undertaking in question-and this in spite of the self-evidences which offered themselves to us and which we cannot simply give up out of hand. Perhaps only a new inquiry back into the ground of this knowledge (as opposed to the inquiry back into the ground of objective knowledge) will lead to the clarification and thus the corresponding limitation of its true sense. In the study of correlation our constant theme was the world and mankind as the subjectivity which, in community, intentionally brings about the accomplishment of world-validity. Our epoche (the one determining our present investigation) denied us all natural worldlife and its worldly interests. It gave us a position above these. Any interest in the being, actuality, or nonbeing of the world, i.e., any interest theoretically oriented toward knowledge of the world, and even any interest which is practical in the usual sense, with its dependence on the presuppositions of its situational truths, is forbidden; this applies not only to the pursuit, for ourselves, of our own interests (we who are philosophizing) but also to any participation in the interests of our fellow men -for in this case we would still be interested indirectly in existing actuality. No objective truth, whether in the prescientific or the scientific sense, i.e., no claim about objective being, ever enters our sphere of scientific discipline, whether as a premise or as a conclusion. Here we could discover a first difficulty. Are not we also doing science? Are we not establishing truths about true being? Are we not entering upon the dangerous road of double truth? Can there be, next to objective truth, yet a second truth, the subjective? The answer, of course, is as follows: it is precisely the result of inquiry within the epoche-a strange but self-evident result, which can be ultimately clarified only through our present reflection-that the natural, objective world-life is only a particular mode of the transcendental life which forever constitutes the world, [but] in such a way that transcendental subjectivity, while living on in this mode, has not become conscious of the constituting horizons and never can [176] become aware of them. It lives in
"infatuation," so to speak, with the poles of unity without being
aware of the constituting multiplicities belonging essentially to them-for
this, precisely, would require a complete reorientation and reflection.
Objective truth belongs exclusively within the attitude of natural human worldlife.
It arises originally out of the needs of human praxis as the intent to secure
what is straightforwardly given as existing (the object-pole anticipated in
ontic certainty as persisting) against the possible modalizations of certainty.
In the reorientation of the epoche nothing is lost, none of the interests and
ends of world-life, and thus also none of the ends of knowledge. But for all
these things their essential subjective correlates are exhibited, and thus
the full and true ontic meaning of objective being, and thus of all objective
truth, is set forth. Philosophy as universal objective
science-and this is what all philosophy of the ancient tradition
was-together with all the objective sciences, is not universal science at all.
It brings into its sphere of inquiry only the constituted object-poles and
remains blind to the full concrete being and life that constitutes them
transcendentally. But, as we said, though we shall hold onto this as truth, we
must still carry out a final clarification of its meaning. A
second difficulty emerges. The epoche in respect to all natural human
life-interests appears to be a turning-away from them (which is, by the way, one
of the most common misunder standings of the transcendental epoche). But if it
were meant in this way, there would be no transcendental inquiry. How could we
take perception and the perceived, memory and the remembered, the objective
and every sort of verification of the objective, including art, science,
and philosophy, as a transcendental theme without living through these sorts of
things as examples and indeed with [their] full self-evidence? This is, in fact,
quite true. Thus in a certain sense the philosopher within the epoche must also
"naturally live through" the natural life; yet the epoche effects an
immense difference in that it changes the entire manner of investigation
and, furthermore, reshapes the goal of knowledge in the whole of its ontic
meaning. In straightforward natural life all purposes terminate in "the" world and all knowledge terminates
in what actually exists as secured by verification. The world is
the open universe, the horizon of "termini," the universal field of
what exists which is presupposed by all praxis and is continually enriched by
its results. Thus the world is the totality of what is taken for granted as
verifiable; it is "there" through an aiming [Abzielung]
and is the ground for ever [177] new aimings at what is-what
"actually" is. In the epoche, however, we go back to the subjectivity
which ultimately aims, which already has results, already has the
world through previous aims and their fulfillment; and [we go back] to the ways
in which this subjectivity has, "has brought about," and continues to
shape the world through its concealed internal "method." The interest
of the phenomenologist is not aimed at the ready-made world or at external,
purposeful activity in it, which itself is something "constituted."
The phenomenologist carries out every sort of praxis, either actually or in
sympathetic understanding, but not in such a way that its fulfilling
"end" is his end, the one in which he terminates. Rather, he takes
being-an-end as such, this living toward goals in world-life and terminating in
them, as the subject of his own investigation in respect to the subjective
aspects pervading them; and thus the naive ontic meaning of the world in general
is transformed for him into the meaning "system of poles for a
transcendental subjectivity," which "has" a world and real
entities within it, just as it has these poles, by constituting them. This is
obviously something fundamentally different from the transformation of
"ends" into "means," into premises for new worldly ends, a
transformation which remains within the world itself. What has been said
here presupposes that one is fully clear about our way of explicating
intentional life, through the epoche, as accomplishing life, and that one has
first achieved the insight that even in the most straightforward perception, and
likewise in every consciousness of something having the simple, straightforward
validity of existence, there lies an aiming, one that is realized in the
harmoniousness of ever new ontic validities (those of the manners of
givenness themselves) and, in the case of intuition, realizes the "thing
itself." No matter what variations we may find in intentionality as we
proceed on from its first exhibition in the ways of being actually directed
toward objects, they are all variational forms of accomplishments which are
ultimately those of the ego. A third difficulty
is that we cannot see how, in the epoche, the "Heraclitean flux" of
constituting life can be treated descriptively in its individual facticity.
Here we are guided by the distinction common in objective world-science between
descriptive sciences-which, on the basis of experience, describe and
classify factual existence and sketch out inductive generalities within
intuitive experience so as to establish such existence for everyone who has the
same experience-and sciences of laws, [178] the sciences of unconditional generalities.
Still, whatever the status of this objective difference, no real difficulty
results for us, since it would be illegitimate to make demands on the transcendental
sphere which originate in the sphere of objectivity. It is, however, correct
that there can be no analogue to an empirical science of fact, no
"descriptive" science of transcendental being and life understood as
an inductive science based on experience alone, in the sense of establishing individual transcendental correlations as they factually occur and
disappear. Not even the single philosopher by himself, within the epoche, can
hold fast to anything in this elusively flowing life, repeat it with always the
same content, and become so certain of its this-ness and its being-such that he
could describe it, document it, so to speak (even for his own person alone), in
definitive statements. But the full concrete facticity of universal
transcendental subjectivity can nevertheless be scientifically grasped in
another good sense, precisely because, truly through an eidetic method, the
great task can and must be undertaken of investigating the essential form of the
transcendental accomplishments in all their types of individual and
intersubjective accomplishments, that is, the total essential form of
transcendentally accomplishing subjectivity in all its social forms. The
fact is here, as belonging to its essence, and it is determinable only through its essence; there is no way of documenting it
empirically in a sense analogous to what is done in the objective sphere through
inductive experience. § 53.
The paradox of human subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at
the same time being an object in the world. BUT NOW A
TRULY serious difficulty arises which
assails our whole undertaking and the sense of its results and indeed
necessitates a reshaping of both. By virtue of our present method of
epoche, everything objective is transformed into something subjective. Clearly
this cannot be meant in such a way that through this method the existing world
and the human worldrepresentation are set over against each other and that,
on the ground of the world, taken for granted as actually existing, we [179] inquire into the
subjective, i.e., into the psychic occurrences in men through which they gain
experience of the world, everyday or scientific opinions about the world, their
particular sensible and conceptual "world-pictures." Scientific
discipline for us is not that of the psychologist. Through the radical epoche
every interest in the actuality or nonactuality of the world (in all modalities,
thus including possibility and conceivability, as well as the decidability of
this sort of thing) is put out of play. By the same token, we are not concerned
here with any scientific psychology and its problems. For the latter the
world, presupposed by it as unquestionably existing, is the ground; and it is
precisely this ground that the epoche has taken from us. And in the pure
attitude focused upon correlations, created by the epoche, the world, the
objective, becomes itself something subjective. In this attitude, paradoxically,
even the "subjective" is relativized, namely, in the following way.
The world (called "transcendental phenomenon" in the transformed
attitude) is from the start taken only as a correlate of the subjective
appearances, views, subjective acts and capacities through which it constantly
has, and ever attains anew, its changeable [but] unitary sense. Now if the
inquiry gets underway, proceeding from the world (which already has merely the
manner of being of a unity of meaning) back to the essential forms of these
"appearances and views" of it, the latter count as its
"subjective manners of givenness." If, then, through yet another
reflection and regressive inquiry the ego-poles and everything about them of a
specifically ego-character become the subject of essential inquiry, they
now become, in a new and still higher sense, the subjective aspect of the world
and also of its manners of appearing. But within the epoche a universal concept
of the subjective encompasses everything: ego-pole and universe of ego-poles,
multiplicities of appearance or object-poles and the universe of object-poles. But precisely here lies the difficulty. Universal intersubjectivity, into which all objectivity, everything that exists at all, is resolved, can obviously be nothing other than mankind; and the latter is undeniably a component part of the world. How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment? [180] The subjective part of the
world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too. What an
absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved, even a necessary
one, arising necessarily out of the constant tension between the power of what
is taken for granted in the natural objective attitude (the power of
"common sense")1 and the opposed attitude of the
"disinterested spectator"? The latter is, to be sure, extremely
difficult to carry out in a radical way, since it is constantly threatened by
misunderstandings. Furthermore, by carrying out the epoche the phenomenologist
by no means straightway commands a horizon of obviously possible new projects;
a transcendental field of work does not immediately spread before him, preformed
in a set of obvious types. The world is the sole universe of what is pregiven as
obvious. From the beginning the phenomenologist lives in the paradox of having
to look upon the obvious as questionable, as enigmatic, and of henceforth being
unable to have any other scientific theme than that of transforming the
universal obviousness of the being of the world -for him the greatest of all
enigmas-into something intelligible.2 If the paradox just
developed were insoluble, it would mean that an actually universal and radical
epoche could not be carried out at all, that is, for the purposes of a
science rigorously bound to it. If the disinterestedness and the epoche were
merely those of the psychologist, to which no one objects since they move on the
ground of the world, then anything that is really tenable about our insights
would be reduced to objective-psychological essential insights, though of a
new style. But can we be content with this? Can we be satisfied simply with the
notion that human beings are subjects
for the world (the world which for
consciousness is their world) and at the same time are objects in this world? As
scientists, can we content ourselves with the view that God created the world
and human beings within it, that he endowed the latter with consciousness and
reason, that is, with the capacity for knowledge, the highest instance of which
is scientific knowledge? For the nalvete that belongs to the essence of positive
religion this may be undoubted truth and remain a truth forever, even though the
philosophers cannot be content with such naivete. The enigma of the creation and
that of God himself are essential component parts of positive religion. For
the philosopher, however, this, and also the 1. Husserl uses the English term. 2.
I.e.,
of transforming this Selbstverständlichkeit into
a Verständlichkeit. [181] juxtaposition
"subjectivity in the world as object" and at the same time
"conscious subject for the world," contain a necessary theoretical
question, that of understanding how this is possible. The epoche, in giving us
the attitude above the subject-object correlation which belongs to the
world and thus the attitude of focus upon the transcendental
subject-object correlation, leads us
to recognize, in self-reflection, that the world that exists for us, that is,
our world in its being and being-such, takes its ontic meaning entirely from our
intentional life through a priori types of accomplishments that can be exhibited
rather than argumentatively constructed or conceived through mythical
thinking. One
can make no headway with this, and with the profound difficulties contained in
it, if one hastily overlooks it and spares oneself the trouble of making
consistent regressive inquiries and investigations or if one adduces arguments
from the workshops of past philosophers, say Aristotle or Thomas, and carries on
a game of logical argumentations and refutations. In the epoche neither logic
nor any a priori nor any philosophical demonstration in the venerable old
style can provide us with artillery. Rather, like all objective-scientific
discipline, they are naive and are themselves to be subjected to the epoche. On
the other hand, what is peculiarly proper to the essence of the incipient
philosophy of this phenomenological-transcendental radicalism is that, as
we have said before, rather than having a ground of things taken for granted and
ready in advance, as does objective philosophy, it excludes in principle a
ground of this or any other sort. Thus it must begin without any underlying
ground. But immediately it achieves the possibility of creating a ground
for itself through its own powers, namely, in mastering, through original
self-reflection, the naive world as transformed into a phenomenon or rather
a universe of phenomena. Its beginning course, like that carried out above in
rough outlines, is necessarily one of experiencing and thinking in naive
self-evidence. It possesses no formed logic and methodology in advance and can
achieve its method and even the genuine sense of its accomplishments only
through ever renewed self-reflections. Its fate (understood subsequently,
to be sure, as an essentially necessary one) is to become involved again and
again in paradoxes, which, arising out of uninvestigated and even unnoticed
horizons, remain functional and announce themselves as
incomprehensibilities. [182] §54.
The resolution of the paradox: a.) We as human beings,
and we as ultimately functioning-accomplishing subjects. WHAT IS THE STATUS, now, of the paradox presently under
discussion-that of humanity as world-constituting subjectivity and yet as
incorporated in the world itself? In the naivete of our first approach we were
interested in the horizons of remarkable discoveries which opened up again and
again; and in the direction of our gaze which naturally came first, we held
fast to the correlation belonging to the first level of reflection: i.e., objectpole
vs. manner of givenness (manner of appearance in the broadest sense). The ego
was mentioned as the subject matter of the highest level of reflection; but in
the careful analytic-descriptive procedure, which naturally favors the more
detailed interconnections, it did not receive its full due. For the depths
of its functioning being make themselves felt only belatedly. In connection with
this, what was lacking was the phenomenon of the change of signification of [the
form] "I"-just as I am saying "I" right now-into "other
I's," into "all of us," we who are many "1's," and
among whom I am but one "I." What was lacking, then, was the problem of the
constitution of intersubjectivity-this "all of us"-from my point of
view, indeed "in" me. These are problems which did not announce
themselves on the pathway we allowed ourselves to be drawn into, along which we
allowed ourselves to be propelled. Now they will compel our attention. For the
necessity of stopping here and entering into self-reflectim makes itself
felt most sharply through the question which at last and unavoidably arises: who
are we, as subjects performing the meaning- and
validity-accomplishment of universal constitution-as those who, in
community, constitute the world as a system of poles, as the intentional
structure of community life? Can "we" mean "we human
beings," human beings in the natural-objective sense, i.e., as real
entities in the world? But are these real entities not themselves
"phenomena" and as such themselves object-poles and subject matter for
inquiry back into the correlative intentionalities of which they are the poles,
through whose function they have, and have attained, their ontic meaning? [183] Naturally this question must be answered in the affirmative. Indeed, as in the case of all regional categories of the world, of all essential ontic types, we can actually exhibit the constitutive formation of meaning provided we have proceeded far enough in the method to ask the appropriate questions. Here it is a case of inquiries proceeding from real human beings back to their "manners of givenness," their manners of "appearing," first of all in perceptual appearance, i.e., in the mode of original self-givenness, of manners of harmonious verification and correction, of identification through rerecognition as the same human person: as the person previously known "personally" to us, the same one of whom others speak, with whom they also have become acquainted, etc. In other words, the obviousness of: "There stands a man, in this social group of persons well known to one another," must be resolved into its transcendental questions. But are the transcendental
subjects, i.e., those functioning
in the constitution of the world,
human beings? After all, the epoche has made them into "phenomena," so
that the philoso pher within the epoche has neither himself nor the others
naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as "phenomena," as
poles for transcendental regressive inquiries. Clearly here, in the radical
consistency of the epoche, each "I" is considered purely as the
ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities and thence as being directed
at what appears in ontic certainty "through" the appearances, the
manners of givenness of the latter --i.e., as directed toward the particular
object-pole and its pole-horizon, the world. To all this, then, belong further
regressive inquiries in all these directions of reflection. Concretely, each
"I" is not merely an ego-pole but an "I" with all its
accomplishments and accomplished acquisitions, including the world as existing
and being-such. But in the epoche and in the pure focus upon the functioning
ego-pole, and thence upon the concrete whole of life and of its intentional
intermediary and final structures, it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor
psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the
"phenomenon," to the world as constituted pole. [184] b.) As primal ego, I constitute my
horizon of transcendental others as cosubjects within the transcendental
intersubjectivity which constitutes the world. Nevertheless, we cannot be
content; we are still caught in the paradox. Indeed, our naive procedure was not
quite correct, and this is because we have forgotten ourselves, the philoso
phizers; or, to put it more distinctly: I am the one who performs the epoch;--,
and, even if there are others, and even if they practice the epoche in direct
community with me, [they and] all other human beings with their entire act-life
are included, for me, within my epoche, in the world-phenomenon which, in my
epoche, is exclusively mine. The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical
solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly
radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has
somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for
theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but
who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego,
who still has his you, his we, his total community of cosubjects in natural
validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the
personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the
privilege of I-the-man among other men. The "I" that I attain in
the epoche, which would be the same as the "ego" within a critical
reinterpretation and correction of the Cartesian conception, is actually called
"I" only by equivocation-though it is an essential equivocation since,
when I name it in reflection, I can say nothing other than: it is I who practice
the epoche, I who interrogate, as phenomenon, the world which is now valid
for me according to its being and being-such, with all its human beings, of whom
I am so fully conscious; it is I who stand above all natural existence that has
meaning for me, who am the ego-pole of this transcendental life, in which, at
first, the world has meaning for me purely as world; it is I who, taken in full
concreteness, encompass all that. This does not mean that our earlier insights,
already expressed as transcendental ones, were illusions and that it is not
justifiable to speak, in spite of the above, of a transcendental intersubjectivity
constituting the world as "world for all," in which I again appear,
this time as "one" transcendental "I" among others, whereby
"we all" are taken as functioning transcendentally. [185] But it was wrong,
methodically, to jump immediately into transcendental intersubjectivity and to
leap over the primal "I," the ego of my epoche, which can never lose
its uniqueness and personal indeclinability. It is only an apparent
contradiction to this that the ego -- through a particular constitutive
accomplishment of its own -- makes itself declinable, for itself,
transcendentally; that, starting from itself and in itself, it constitutes
transcendental intersubjectivity, to which it then adds itself as a merely
privileged member, namely, as "I" among the transcendental
others. This is what philosophical self-exposition in the epoche actually
teaches us. It can show how the always singular "I," in the original
constituting life proceeding within it, constitutes a first sphere of
objects, the "primordial" sphere; how it then, starting from this, in
a motivated fashion, performs a constitutive accomplishment through which an
intentional modification of itself and its primordiality achieves ontic
validity under the title of "alien-perception," perception of others,
of another "I" who is for himself an "I" as I am. This
becomes understandable by analogy if we already understand, through the
transcendental exposition of recollection, that to what is recollected, what is
past (which has the ontic meaning of a present having passed) there belongs also
a past "I" of that present, whereas the actual, original "I"
is that of immediate presence; to this presence, recollection belongs as a
present experience, in addition to what appears as the present sphere of facts.
Thus the immediate "I" performs an accomplishment through which it
constitutes a variational mode of itself as existing (in the mode of having
passed). Starting from this we can trace how the immediate "I,"
flowingly-statically present, constitutes itself in self-temporalization as
enduring through "its" pasts. In the same way, the immediate
"I," already enduring in the enduring primordial sphere,
constitutes in itself another as other. Self-temporalization through
depresentation [Ent-Gegenwärtigung], so to speak (through recollection), has its analogue
in my self-alienation [Ent-Fremdung]
(empathy as a depresentation of a
higher level-depresentation of my primal presence [Urpräsenz] into a merely presentified [vergegenwärtigte] primal presence). Thus, in me, "another I"
achieves ontic validity as copresent [kompräsent] with his own ways of being self-evidently verified,
which are obviously quite different from those of a
"sense"-perception. Only
by starting from the ego and the system of its transcendental functions and
accomplishments can we methodically [186] exhibit
transcendental intersubjectivity and its transcendental communalization, through
which, in the functioning system of ego-poles, the "world for all,"
and for each subject as world for all, is constituted. Only in this way, in an
essential system of forward steps, can we gain an ultimate comprehension of the
fact that each transcendental "I" within intersubjectivity (as
coconstituting the world in the way indicated) must necessarily be constituted
in the world as a human being; in other words, that each human being “bears
within himself a transcendental ‘I’”-- not as a real part or a stratum of
his soul (which would be absurd) but rather insofar as he is the
self-objectification, as exhibited through phenomenological self-reflection, of
the corresponding transcendental “I”. Nevertheless, every human being
who carried out the epoche could certainly recognize his ultimate "I,"
which functions in all his human activity. The naivet6 of the first epoche had
the result, as we immediately saw, that I, the philosophizing "ego,"
in taking myself as functioning "I," as ego-pole of transcendental
acts and accomplishments, proceeded in one leap and without grounding, that is,
illegitimately, to attribute to the mankind in which I find myself the same
transformation into functioning transcendental subjectivity which I had
carried out alone in myself. In spite of the methodical illegitimacy, this
contained a truth. At all events, however, we must -- for the most profound
philosophical reasons, which we cannot go into further, and which are not only
methodical in character -- do justice to the absolute singularity of the ego and
its central position in all constitution. § 55.
The correction in principle of our first application of the epoche by
reducing it to the absolutely unique, ultimately functioning ego. ACCORDINGLY, AS AGAINST the first application of the epoche, a second is
required, or rather a conscious reshaping of the epoche through a reduction to
the absolute ego as the ultimately unique center of function in all
constitution. This determines henceforth the whole method of transcendental
phenomenology. In advance there is the world, ever pregiven and [187] undoubted in ontic
certainty and self-verification. Even though l have not [explicitly]
"presupposed" it as a ground, it still has validity for me, the
"I" of the cogito, through constant self-verification, together
with everything that it is for me, in particular details sometimes objectively
and legitimately so, sometimes not, and together with all sciences and arts,
together with all social and personal configurations and institutions, insofar
as it is just the world that is actual for me. There can be no stronger realism
than this, if by this word nothing more is meant than: "I am certain of
being a human being who lives in this world, etc., and I doubt it not in the
least." But the great problem is precisely to understand what is here so
"obvious." The method now requires that the ego, beginning with its
concrete world-phenomenon, systematically inquire back, and thereby become
acquainted with itself, the transcendental ego, in its concreteness, in the
system of its constitutive levels and its incredibly intricate [patterns of]
validity-founding.1 At the onset of the epoche the ego is given
apodictically, but as a "mute concreteness." It must be brought to
exposition, to expression, through systematic intentional
"analysis" which inquires back from the world-phenomenon. In this
systematic procedure one at first attains the correlation between the world and
transcendental subjectivity as objectified in mankind. But then new questions impose themselves in regard to this mankind: are the insane also objectifications of the subjects being discussed in connection with the accomplishment of world-constitution? And what about children, even those who already have a certain amount of world-consciousness? After all, it is only from the mature and normal human beings who bring them up that they first become acquainted with the world in the full sense of the world-for-all, that is, the world of culture. And what about animals? There arise problems of intentional modifications through which we can and must attribute to all these conscious subjects-those that do not cofunction in respect to the world understood in the hitherto accepted (and always fundamental) sense, that is, the world which has truth through "reason" -- their manner of transcendentality, precisely as "analogues" of ourselves. The meaning of this analogy will then itself represent a transcendental problem. This naturally extends into the realm of the transcendental problems which finally encompass 1.
Geltungsfundierungen, i.e., the manner in which some validities are
founded upon or presuppose others. For the notion of Fundierung see Ideen,
Vol.
I, §
§ 116,
117. [188] all living beings insofar as they have, even
indirectly but still verifiably, something like "life," and even
communal life in the spiritual [geistige]
sense. Also appearing thereby, in
different steps, first in respect to human beings and then universally, are the
problems of genesis [Generativität],
the problems of transcendental
historicity [Geschichtlichkeit], the problems of the transcendental inquiry which
starts from the essential forms of human existence in society, in personalities
of a higher order,2 and proceeds back to their transcendental and
thus absolute signification; further, there are the problems of birth and death
and of the transcendental constitution of their meaning as world occurrences,
and there is the problem of the sexes. And finally, concerning the problem of
the "unconscious" that is so much discussed today -- dreamless sleep,
loss of consciousness, and whatever else of the same or similar nature may be
included under this title -- this is in any case a matter of occurrences in the
pregiven world, and they naturally come under the transcendental problem of
constitution, as do birth and death. As something existing in the world common
to all, this sort of thing has its manners of ontic verification, of
"self-giving," which are quite particular but which originally create
the ontic meaning for beings of such particularity. Accordingly, within the absolutely
universal epoche, in respect to beings having this or any other kind of meaning,
the appropriate constitutional questions have to be posed. In
accord with all this it is clear that there is no conceivable meaningful problem
in previous philosophy, and no conceivable problem of being at all, that could
not be arrived at by transcendental phenomenology at some point along its
way. This includes the problems that phenomenology itself poses, at a higher
level of reflection, to the phenomenologist: that is, not only problems
corresponding to the language, truth, science, and reason, in all their forms,
which are constituted within the natural world, but problems of phenomenological
language, truth, reason. From
this one also understands the sense of the demand for apodicticity in regard to
the ego and all transcendental knowledge gained upon this transcendental
basis. Having arrived at the ego, one becomes
aware of standing within a sphere of self-evidence of such a nature that any
attempt to inquire behind it would be absurd. By contrast, every ordinary appeal
to self-evidence, insofar as it was supposed to cut off further regressive 2.
I.e.,
communities, states, etc. [189] inquiry, was theoretically no better than an
appeal to an oracle through which a god reveals himself. All natural
self-evidences, those of all objective sciences (not excluding those of formal
logic and mathematics), belong to the realm of what is "obvious,"
what in truth has a background of incomprehensibility. Every [kind of]
self-evidence is the title of a problem, with the sole exception of
phenomenological self-evidence, after it has reflectively clarified itself and
shown itself to be ultimate self-evidence. It is naturally a ludicrous,
though unfortunately common misunderstanding, to seek to attack transcendental
phenomenology as "Cartesianism," as if its ego cogito were a premise or set of premises from which the rest
of knowledge (whereby one naively speaks only of objective knowledge) was to be
deduced, absolutely "secured." The point is not to secure objectivity
but to understand it. One must finally achieve the insight that no objective
science, no matter how exact, explains or ever can explain anything in a serious
sense. To deduce is not to explain. To predict, or to recognize the objective
forms of the composition of physical or chemical bodies and to predict
accordingly-all this explains nothing but is in need of explanation. The only
true way to explain is to make transcendentally understandable. Everything
objective demands to be understood. Natural-scientific knowing about nature thus
gives us no truly explanatory, no ultimate knowledge of nature because it does
not investigate nature at all in the absolute framework through which its actual
and genuine being reveals its ontic meaning; thus natural science never
reaches this being thematically. This does not detract in the least from the
greatness of its creative geniuses or their accomplishments, just as the being
of the objective world in the natural attitude, and this attitude itself, have
lost nothing through the fact that they are, so to speak, "understood back
into" [zurückverstanden] the absolute sphere of being in which they
ultimately and truly are. To be sure, the knowledge [attained through] the
constitutive "internal" method, through which all objective-scientific
method acquires its meaning and possibility, cannot be without significance for
the scientist of nature or any other objective scientist. It is, after all, a
matter of the most radical and most profound self-reflection of accomplishing
subjectivity; how could it not be of service in protecting the naive, ordinary
accomplishment from misunderstandings such as are to be observed in abundance,
for example, in the influence of naturalistic epistemology and in the
idolization of a logic that does not understand itself?
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