Summary: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (page 9)

III. Clarification of the Transcendental Problem – The Role of Psychology

Transcendental phenomenology begins with a reflective inquiry into the lifeworld that is always already given.

Kant’s unspoken presupposition is his acceptance of the surrounding lifeworld as self-evident.

Husserl, by contrast, starts from this world as we immediately perceive it. Things present themselves to us through seeing, touching, and other modes of perception. Our sensory organs are caught up in a movement that Husserl calls kinesthesis.

The flesh participates in these various sensations: The flesh is, in a quite unique way, always present in the field of perception, with complete immediacy, in a sense of being quite unique [...] which is designated by the word organ ¹.

Flesh is fundamentally distinct from the body. I do not perceive the flesh of others—only their bodies. I can perceive only my own flesh.

The lifeworld is a domain of subjective phenomena that have remained largely anonymous:

No objective science, no psychology—despite its ambition to establish itself as the universal science of the subjective—nor any philosopher, has ever discovered this realm of the subjective.

This is the privilege of transcendental phenomenology.

Warned by Hume against any recourse to psychology, Kant deliberately prevents his readers from appealing to empirical intuition or to reflection on inner states in order to articulate the authentic problem of understanding.

Husserl reminds us that the lifeworld constantly functions as a background and constitutes a permanent ground of validity—an ever-ready source of self-evidence ². Thus, the sciences build upon the obviousness of the lifeworld, for it is from this domain that they derive what is necessary for their respective inquiries.

The problem, then, lies in the fact that the subjective-relative nature of the lifeworld must be overcome by the scientist, who instead aims at being-in-itself. Yet, paradoxically, the subjective-relative remains, for him, a necessary source of confirmation and self-evidence.

It is therefore essential to reaffirm the original right of the lifeworld’s self-evidence. It must be clearly recognised that within it lie the hidden sources of the very foundations of the natural sciences.

Let us then set aside the objectivo-logical self-evidence and return to the original self-evidence in which the lifeworld is constantly given.

The paradox, let us recall, is that the world of science appears truer than the lifeworld, and yet, at the same time, it is both grounded in and encompassed by it.

To resolve this problem, we must find a new kind of science.

For this, we require an epochè with respect to the objective sciences.

Husserl defines the lifeworld as the spatio-temporal world of things as we experience them in our pre-scientific and extra-scientific life ³.

This world has a horizon—the totality of things of which we can have an experience.

Our task, then, is to uncover a universal a priori that pertains purely to the lifeworld ⁴.

Indeed, only by resorting to this a priori—which must unfold within a specialised a priori science—can we discover a truly radical foundation for our aprioristic sciences, the objectivo-logical sciences ⁵.

Husserl demonstrates that there is a fundamental difference between the way we are aware of the world and the way we are aware of [...] an object ⁶ situated within that world.

The mode of being of an object in the world is distinct from the mode of being of the world itself; we are thus aware of them through two different modes of awareness.

Through the transcendental epoché, we suspend the validity of the world that is always already given. In doing so, we reach the pre-given dimension of the world as such ⁷. Suspending its validity does not mean denying its existence; rather, it means ceasing to assert that the lifeworld necessarily refers to a really existing external world.

This is the meaning of Husserl’s famous transcendental reduction (or epoché), upon which transcendental phenomenology is founded.

The world does not disappear; it loses nothing of its being or its objective truths, but all natural interests are bracketed:

I stand above the world, which has now become for me a phenomenon ⁸.

There is now a reduction of the world to the transcendental phenomenon “world,” and by the same token, to its correlate: transcendental subjectivity. This subjectivity is the locus and source of all the content of the world.

To describe this subjectivity in its operations—to articulate the different ways in which it constitutes the world itself as a sense of being—we must no longer remain within the old, familiar ground of the world.

We must not seek its hidden causes, but rather approach it solely from the perspective under which it is subjectively meaningful, that is, from the aspect under which it gives itself ⁹.

In other words, instead of being oriented towards things in order to know them as they are, we must instead interrogate them regarding the modes of their subjective givenness—on the way in which they offer themselves as being ¹⁰.

We have seen that in the perception of things, an entire horizon of modes of appearance is involved. At the same time, things present themselves to us only under a single aspect; yet, through a process of synthesis, we integrate these different aspects into a unified object. Finally, although perception is always anchored in the present, this present is always preceded by an infinite past and oriented towards an open future ¹¹. This means that, with regard to any object, there is a continuity of retentions in one direction and, in the other, a continuity of protentions ¹².

At the heart of the cogito, we can distinguish three instances: the ego, the cogitatio (or subjective pole), and finally the cogitata (the objective pole).

The paradox of human subjectivity is that it is both the subject for the world and, at the same time, an object within the world.

Through the epoché, the entire objective has metamorphosed into the subjective ¹³.

Husserl does not, at this point, fully elaborate the content and method of transcendental phenomenology. For that, one should preferably turn to the Cartesian Meditations.

Instead, he simply traces the path from psychology to transcendental phenomenology, and ultimately concludes: Philosophy is nothing other than rationalism, and that through and through ¹⁴.

¹ III,28, p.121
² III,33, p.138
³ III, 36, p.157
⁴ III,36,p.160
⁵ ibid.
⁶ III,37, p.162
⁷ III, 39, p.168
⁸ III, 41, p.173
⁹ III, 45, p.178
¹⁰ III, 46, p.180
¹¹ III, 46, p.182
¹² ibid.
¹³ III, 53, p.203
¹⁴ III, 73, p.302