Summary: Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy
This work, published in 1913, describes the path that leads from the natural attitude to the phenomenological attitude. It is important to distinguish between phenomenology and psychology, and more generally between the sciences of fact and the sciences of essence. This is the starting point for a landmark critique of empiricism.
Other works: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
In the Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology, Husserl intends to define phenomenology, the science of phenomena, as opposed to psychology, in other words a set of immanent descriptions dealing with psychic experience, limited to inner experience.
Phenomenology is as far removed from psychology, as geometry is from a science of nature such as physics, even though both have the same object: consciousness.
In fact, whereas psychology deals with facts and natural realities, phenomenology deals with essences, as an "eidetic" science, which are unreal phenomena.
It requires the abandonment of natural attitudes, through the phenomenological reduction (or eidetic reduction). In order to show clearly the way in which this abandonment takes place, and to define more precisely the meaning of this reduction, Husserl will start from the natural point of view, that is to say from consciousness as it offers itself in psychological experience, in opposition to the world.
Section I Essences and the knowledge of essences
The natural attitude begins with experience and remains there. The horizon that circumscribes for it any kind of research is the world. The natural attitude posits as equivalents " being true", "being real", "being in the world".
Every science has as its foundation an originary giving intuition. For the natural attitude, this is perception. As such, it defines the world as the sum of the objects of possible experience
1.
The sciences derived from natural experience are those that relate to the world; these are the natural sciences (physics, biology, etc.) but also the sciences of the mind (sociology, psychology, etc.).
Facts are contingent, they could be other than they are. That tree located there might not exist or might exist elsewhere. Husserl calls the object of the sciences derived from the natural attitude "facticity", and this is always characterised by contingency.
Now each thing, in its contingency, nevertheless has an essence, an "Eidos", which it is important to grasp in its purity and which in turn subordinates itself to truths of essence
2.
This Eidos is grasped when we understand that an individual object is not just something individual, a "this there", because of the fact that it has in itself this or that constitution, it has its specificity; its permanent bundle of essential predicates that necessarily arise for it (insofar as it is what it is)
3.
Husserl takes the example of music: each sonority has its essence and at the top we find the general essence of sound.
The empirical intuition of the individual can be converted into a vision of the essence, or ideation. The term of the vision is then the corresponding pure essence or Eidos.
This vision which gives the essence may be adequate or inadequate.
Husserl therefore distinguishes in the Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology between sensible intuition and eidetic intuition: we must grasp, through the second, the essence that is hidden at the heart of the object that we glimpse through sensible intuition.
He defines the object, like the logician, as any possible subject of true predicative judgements
4 and refrains from giving the eidos or essence the mystical meaning that can be found, for example, in Plato.
These two types of object: existing real facts and their essences give rise to truths that are found on two different types of plane:
Truths about essences do not contain the slightest assertion about facts. Nor can the slightest truth bearing on facts be derived from them alone 5.
The essence of an object can be approximated to the genus: The essence - the "genus" color - is other than the essence - the "genus" - sound
6 and hence any judgement bearing on essences can be equivalently converted into a judgement of unconditioned generality
7.
To the sciences of fact (as we have seen: physics, psychology, etc.) are opposed the sciences of essence: logic, pure mathematics, the pure theory of time and space, etc.
1 Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie, Gallimard, Paris, 1950, trad. P. Ricoeur, §1, p.15
2 §2, p.17
3 ibid.
4 §3, p.22
5 §4, p.25
6 §5, p.27
7 §5, p.28