Summary: Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (page 4)

Section II: Fundamental Phenomenological Considerations

Husserl seeks to describe what he calls the natural attitude.¹ This is precisely what the phenomenologist must suspend.² It is therefore essential to understand its nature in order to grasp, by contrast, the approach of the phenomenologist.

In the natural attitude, I am experientially aware of a spatio-temporal world. Things and animate beings are simply there for me, present, whether I attend to them or not.

However, the set of objects co-present in the current field of perception does not exhaust the world:

What is currently perceived is surrounded by an obscurely conscious horizon of indeterminate reality.³

To this must be added the multiple possibilities or intuitive conjectures. This indeterminate environment, extending infinitely, constitutes the very form of the world as a world.⁴

This horizon exists not only in relation to space, but also in relation to time, encompassing the past and the future, the known and the unknown.

Finally, this world is not given to me merely as a world of things, but with the same immediacy, as a world of values, a world of goods, and a practical world.⁵

It is to this world that the bundle of spontaneous activities of consciousness relates. All the acts and states of the natural attitude, through which I am aware of the world as immediately present, are encompassed in Descartes' single expression: cogito.

For Husserl, it is the aim of the sciences derived from the natural attitude to draw from this world a form of knowledge.⁶

The phenomenologist is the one who subjects this attitude to a radical transformation: doubt. In doubt, the theory or idea we question remains what it is, but we put it out of play, out of circuit, in parentheses.⁷

In the phenomenological epochè, I completely refrain from any judgment concerning spatio-temporal existence.⁸ I suspend any assertion about the real existence or value of things that appear to consciousness.

What remains when we bracket the entire world—ourselves included? This bracketing affects the world as fact, but not the world as Eidos, nor any other sphere of essences.⁹

For instance, it does not affect the number series or arithmetic. More fundamentally, we reach a new region of being¹⁰: the pure experiences of pure consciousness.¹¹

These experiences divide into two kinds: on the one hand, the pure correlates of consciousness; on the other, the pure self¹² of that consciousness.

Husserl refers to these acts of consciousness as "cogitationes," adopting the Cartesian term.

Yet something resists the phenomenological epoché—this doubt concerning the real existence of any phenomenon: consciousness itself. It is to Descartes' credit that he revealed this in his famous cogito.

Husserl summarises this as follows:

[Consciousness] subsists as a "phenomenological residue" and constitutes a region of being original in principle, which may in fact become the field of application of a new science: [...] phenomenology.¹³

Pure consciousness is transcendental consciousness, and the operation that reveals it to us is the transcendental epoché.

We must distinguish psychological analysis from phenomenological analysis. In the first, we remain within the natural attitude, without questioning the existence of what constitutes the content of our experiences of consciousness.

The second is phenomenological analysis.

Similarly, we must be able to differentiate between cogitatio (for example, the perception of this white paper) and cogitatum (the paper itself).

Husserl identifies certain eidetic characteristics of consciousness. Here are two of them:

1. To grasp is to extract. Everything that is perceived stands out against a background of experience.¹⁴ The objects surrounding the perceived paper appear without being singled out. All perception of things thus possesses an intuitive background.¹⁵

Attention detaches from their background the objects of consciousness on which it focuses. All actual experiences are surrounded by an area of inactual experiences; the flow of experience can never consist of pure actualities.¹⁶

2. Husserl, in this passage from Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology, takes up the notion of intentionality—the fundamental property of all consciousness to be consciousness of something.

The grasp of these eidetic features of consciousness is a necessary preliminary step in determining the essence of pure consciousness and, consequently, in defining the field of phenomenology.

¹ §27, p.87
² ibid.
³ ibid., p.89
⁴ ibid.
⁵ ibid., p.90
⁶ §30, p.95
⁷ §31, p.99
⁸ §32, p.102
⁹ §33, p.106
¹⁰ ibid.
¹¹ ibid.
¹² ibid.
¹³ ibid., p.108
¹⁴ §35, p.112
¹⁵ ibid.
¹⁶ ibid., p.114