Husserl’s phenomenological ship followed a Buddhist middle way in the sea of concepts and ideas, avoiding solipsism, psychologism, and the path of metaphysical hubris.
Husserl did not build ontological castles or chase rainbows — his philosophy solves solely the problem of method, which makes it attractive to me and other researchers. Let’s talk about it.
What’s this all about?
The “rationalistic” philosophy of certain regions of the “Western” world has advanced significantly after the philosophical meditations of Descartes, moving not just conclusions, but metaphysical questions themselves closer to the beginning of thought — in the formula “Cogito sum” (better not to translate into English) Descartes returns us to the idea that our thinking comes before the world, and it must be explored first and foremost, otherwise, in our knowledge, we will endlessly lie and invent. But by putting forward this formula, he, together with many followers, did not free himself from the “metaphysical” legacy that remained in humans from the confidence in the stability and definiteness of their thinking. For many philosophers, the issue of thinking has remained a question of the notorious “reality,” a simple analogy, or a change in the location of the study. Many naively began to add the modus “mental” to all the same categories of familiar reality.
The error here lies in the assumption that we can contemplate thinking in terms of an “objective” world, as if it were a piece of matter. With the formula “Cogito sum”, Descartes took an important step in incorporating thinking into the thinking process, not simply as an object, but as a methodological regulator of all that happens in thinking. However, there was a major flaw in his philosophy — by defining thinking as the beginning of knowledge, he did not modify knowledge itself.
This problem was deeply explored by Kant, who introduced “thinking” not only as a formal beginning of knowledge, but as the very beginning of the world, always contained within the boundaries of its own knowledge. Turning everything upside down, Kant also influenced the formation of Husserl’s philosophy, who went even further in defining the “pure reason”.
By the 19th century, among other factors impacted by Kant’s philosophy, formal logic began to lose its authority as a tool for discovering truth. However, nobody denied the importance of rigorous thinking, thus giving rise to the need for “new logic”. The first significant work of Husserl was precisely dedicated to “Logical Investigations,” where he laid the foundations of phenomenology as a new logic, derived not from a vacuum, but from the nature of things themselves.
Back To Things Themselves!
“Vacuum” reflections were loved by scholars in the Middle Ages led by Thomas Aquinas, but it is important to note that their “vacuum” was justified by the idea of God as an absolute beginning. In the syllogism A→B, we have absolute values, suitable only for contexts where we are confident in the absoluteness of the foundations, whether it be mathematics or religion. Reduce the semantic volume of A by half and you will get a completely different world: A/2… B. When reducing the volume of a concept, the same solid consequence can be maintained, or it may not be, or everything will depend on the context (or may not) — for us ordinary mortals, this means that if we do not believe in God or believe in chance, then we cannot simply transfer these conclusions to objective reality. However, the philosopher must at least consider such a possibility.
This issue is well described in Einstein’s works: we can have a very symmetrical and beautiful theory in a vacuum, but if it collapses from observable phenomena, then we must pay attention to the phenomena, not our theory. This is exactly what Husserl calls for: “Back to Things!”.
BUT! Here, Husserl immediately makes an important caveat. Returning to things is not so simple, because if you now want to “return” to something like, for example, the teapot on your table, you will return to your perception of the teapot, woven from a multitude of interconnections that have far from a direct relationship with the teapot-thing (or teapot-in-itself by Kant).
What should we do? We must return to thinking, to our individual Ego (not to be confused with the concept from psychology), which tries to discover the taste of these things as if for the first time, based solely on the nature of the things themselves, without any prejudices. But before we embark on this path of getting to know things, we must cleanse ourselves of the metaphysical inheritance that is always with us due to our historicity — we are somehow forced to live in prejudices.
Ego
Husserl wouldn’t have been the greatest philosopher if he had resorted to a “kitchen sink” analysis of human behavior, like Freud or Marx. In order to avoid unfounded judgments, he developed a rigorous methodology of reflection. First and foremost, he taught to avoid the following enemies of truth-seekers:
Psychologism. Psychology is an empirical science and it is based on data from the external world, on facts that happened to a person and to which he reacted with his psychological state. It says nothing about the original experience of grasping an object in thought, about the primary cognitive instinct. It does not reach the Kantian pure reason, and therefore often speculates with concepts developed by a narrow view of the world. Therefore, psychology is forced to reduce itself to such externally dependent concepts as “instinct,” “need,” “desire,” “fear,” and to avoid such internally justified concepts as “knowledge,” “logic,” “intuition.” If it can be justified, then only through rigorous phenomenology.
Naive Objectivism. This problem has been fought by many philosophers. Husserl tells us that any experiential being is always accidental, and it cannot be subjected to essential analysis outside of thinking, because the accumulating contexts and primitiveness of our everyday thinking distance us from the phenomena of things. This is clear when a person tries to “predict” something. “Naive objectivism,” as Husserl calls it, always inclines us to think that thinking is an object that knows other objects, just as a lamp illuminates other things in the room, but then how are we different from the lamp? Only in the sequence of perception of our thinking, and it is precisely on the fabric of our thinking that the known world unfolds, not our thinking unfolding in that world as a “co-located” object. Any statement “the teapot is a teapot” must be corrected to “the teapot is a phenomenon.” Husserl deals with the problem of this phenomenon, which contains our sensations, thoughts, details of the external world, and something else.
Solipsism. Despite not having direct access to entities in the external world, we still live in this world. Therefore, Husserl, strictly following the phenomenological path, denies accusations of solipsism, that is, the idea that our sensations are the only reality. According to Husserl, solipsism is the lowest step in philosophy, which we must take in order to introduce Descartes’ “Cogito sum” or our pure Ego into the game. But finding our Ego does not yet take us to phenomenology. To engage in phenomenology, we must first define the field of phenomenology, which is not so obvious. For example, in geometry, we clearly understand what we are dealing with by considering ideal space — but this simplicity is explained by the fact that we always have space in perception. In phenomenology, we must reach beyond all conclusions and perceptions in order to study thinking, not these conclusions and perceptions. To find this “secret forest,” Husserl suggests that we perform the so-called “epoché,” which he later calls the “phenomenological reduction.”
Epoché
Epoché is the act of suspending all metaphysical judgments. Intuitively understandable, but difficult to achieve. When looking at a concrete essence, we must put the entire rest of the world in brackets, according to Husserl. Not eliminate, but specifically “put in brackets.” In other words, we take into account its existence to the extent to which it influences the essence being studied. The whole world becomes the background of our subjective Ego, and the first thing we must do before studying the “thing” is to define this Ego with all its possibilities. In this state, we can only actualize a certain perception, while the rest of the world becomes irrelevant or “put in brackets” for the time being.
When exploring our Ego, we must note that any acts of thinking here are not judgments or conclusions, as we are not speaking about the nature of things but rather our perception. We are describing our observations of ourselves, and there can be no place for judgments about the components of thought within thinking, because thinking is immanent. It cannot be external to itself, whereas judgments can only be made about the external. This means that it exists in a continuous flow of experiences and does not stop to “rest”: for example, I thought about the table, remembered yesterday’s lunch, and felt pain under my right shoulder blade — the judgment in this process would be “the table is standing”, but it is only a hypothesis that throws us out of the phenomenological field. To remain in this field, we must understand that all these sensations of the table, lunch, and shoulder blade are one holistic sensation of my thinking, which can think about this or that. If I were to grasp the table in the fullness of its meaningful composition, I would become the table (which, in essence, is the beginning of schizophrenia).
Now just think, all the diversity of actual and potential things for our thinking are united by just one property, which is best realized in the paintings of Goya (on the left) and Van Gogh (on the right).
Everything is merged together, and only through the effort of attention can we distinguish objects in this world. For example, I extract the redness from a painting by Van Gogh and try to perceive its nature. I have never seen redness as such, and I can only imagine it attached to objects. It is “material” because it does not depend on the will of our imagination, and in memory it is present only in the form in which we have encountered it in reality (it “colors”), but it manifests itself differently in different objects. It does not have its own independent nature because it is present in completely different objects (a “live” tomato and a “dead” rusty piece of metal, for example). I always see different shades of redness, and even with regard to the same redness that I saw yesterday, I cannot strictly assert that I see the same redness. I only know about the effect of redness on myself and I don’t know anything about whether others see the same redness. At the same time, the redness in front of me now is modified when I will recall this redness. But still, somehow I synthesize all the modifications of redness into a concrete one, or I think I do.
It is worth noting that we do not perform a psychological analysis of our experiences. If redness produces certain feelings in us, then these feelings are also included in parentheses and are considered only as a factor influencing redness. In turn, feelings can be studied separately as a phenomenon.
Having performed the epoché (or phenomenological reduction), we immediately notice that no object can be given to us in its entirety — any thing is always given unilaterally through multiple references to other things, revealing its individual nuances over time. By performing this work, we have somehow enclosed “redness” within itself, presented it face-to-face to our consciousness and immediately saw its true nature, which we can describe endlessly. We describe and distinguish, rather than make judgments, because our thinking is immanent. Husserl wrote that the most important activity for a phenomenologist is to see and describe adequately.
We distinguish and describe, rather than make judgments, but what does this distinction and description actually mean? This is where we come to the great discovery of intentionality, which became the basis of phenomenology.
Intentionality
Husserl was a student of the famous philosopher Brentano, who first attributed importance to intentionality as a special immanent aspect of consciousness that apprehends an object, differentiating it from its internal content and giving it essential meaning: “In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on.”
In turn, Husserl attributed fundamental significance to this ability. Intentionality is the focusing of attention on the manifold of experiences, judgments, evaluations, feelings, objects in their unidirectional givenness, and so on. The functioning of intentionality in general occurs as follows. First, we find ourselves in an unknown world with an unknown set of sensations.
Next, we exist simultaneously in “two worlds” — the world of our “pure” sensations and the world of phenomena. It is important to note here that the phenomenon exists only in thought. It is still not a “piece of reality” or a “teapot-in-itself”, but only what exists in our thinking.
In the layer of our pure sensations (called noetic by Husserl), there are such categories for us as clarity (sensations), distinctness, recollection (without judgments), premonition, intuition. But there is no psychology here — for example, desires do not exist here, which are impossible without an external object that has no place here. This layer is closer to Platonic ideas, and Husserl notes that the noetic pure layer of thinking is a layer of pre-reflective meanings and ideas. Here there are such inexpressible absolute ideas as being and non-being, truth and falsehood, and so on.
In the layer of phenomena, we differentiate our perceptions and sensations. Here, we focus the attention of our consciousness, which is the execution of an intentional act. Along with a set of meaningful constructions of the noetic layer, we enter the world of phenomena, which Husserl called the noematic layer. It is important to note that while observing a phenomenon, we always have the ability to shift our attention, and each phenomenon necessarily contains other phenomena. This means that each intentional act has its own horizon, which we can expand infinitely. Again, we do not become the object we observe — we remain with our immanent Ego, which is free. This horizon unfolds in two categories — actual and potential. My individual world of thought consists of these two parts. Moreover, the potential always precedes the actual because, as we have already mentioned, we are initially in the position of perceiving our sensations. This is important because otherwise, we would have a “firm support” in some actuality, whether it is God or some other phenomenon — we have nothing like that, but it is precisely this that makes differentiation possible. Such pre-reflexive concepts as possibility, truthfulness, necessity, presumptiveness, consistency, past, future, and so on begin to appear in this layer.
Finally, we reflect on the experience we received, modifying its content. Here, it is essential that we achieve consistency between the noematic and noetic layer. For example, we can return to a previous object and do a new perception with that object, which has been stored in our memory as a particular object. After certain acts, we will understand that it is precisely that object. If the object changes, but we understand that it is precisely that object, then we can recognize different modalities of one object. By studying the background of this object, we will also understand how it exists in a series of other objects. Continuing this descriptive work, we can identify the different levels of content in a specific object — for example, the materiality (softness, fluidity) and the categoriality (the relationship of this table to the tree outside the window, for example, and also it reminds me of the coffee I always drink with it), and so on.
Important! All of this exists only in our thinking, to which parts of external reality “reach”…
But where is reality then?
Entities of the external world as such are outside the intentional content of thinking, and their knowledge is limited by the intentional nature presented by the perception. At the same time, they are always concrete and unreal — if we focus on one thing, it will always be a certain “mystical” concreteness, because we know nothing about its metaphysical connection to the world — only the world of perception is real. At the same time, some intentionally grasped phenomena can be founded in others — and always a certain concreteness will have the highest autonomy and power. That is, a table means much more than my abstract judgment about tables in general. Or the phenomenon “I appreciate this thing as beautiful” is less free than the thing itself as concreteness that I evaluated. This once again shows some limitations of knowledge through judgments, as any judgment immediately distances us from the thing, but we must stubbornly approach them — this is the difficulty of knowing the truth. At the same time, limiting ourselves from hasty judgments, we can very clearly distinguish falsehood from truth in a specific situation. Imagine that we had an hallucination and started to study it in the terms of the familiar physical world, drew up laws, and so on — the delirium of a schizophrenic. But if we conduct a phenomenological analysis, doubt all judgments, return to our pure Ego, and try to study the nature of the phenomenon, we will quickly understand that it exists only in our imagination — this is what schizophrenics do not allow themselves to do because they are firmly convinced of the reality of what is happening.
Three Conclusions
Following Husserl’s choice in favor of the primary “absolute poverty of knowledge”, according to the philosopher’s expression, we have gained countless riches in the form of an authentic world, free from illusions. Within the framework of this article, I can highlight three fundamental moments that have personally influenced me:
In phenomenology, we do not rush towards things as if we will immediately decipher their nature. This is because every object is presented to us in a one-sided way. We purify our thinking and judge things based on their nature while trying to reveal more “aspects”. For the phenomenologist, it is crucial to describe things adequately.
All objects in the external world are unreal because only our intentionality is real. Therefore, we must consider this condition when looking at them. Differentiating between objects is much more important than judging them.
Phenomenology is a method, not a picture of reality. It is a necessary step in obtaining knowledge of truth. It is not some “theory of the universe’s creation”, but a specific methodology for understanding reality, which was used by Proust, Newton, Einstein, Descartes, and all other philosophers, artists, and scientists long before Husserl. If you return to the works of these gentlemen, you will see that they all begin their reflections by analyzing the essence of number, matter, geometric lines, human sensory perceptions, and so on. Husserl applied this approach to the definition of thought itself.
I omitted Husserl’s research on time, intersubjectivity, logic, and other important topics because he already applied the phenomenological method to them, which, in my opinion, was not always correct. However, this does not diminish his great contribution to the crystallization of this method.
P.S. I highlighted certain words in bold, excluding the headings, for a reason. These words, such as method, ego, differentiate, strictly, describe, intentionality, horizon, object, and distinction, are crucial for a phenomenologist.