Beyond rationalism, empiricism, and Kantianism
The preceding two chapters studied Husserl's conception of phenomenology, the science of the essence of consciousness. Husserl's approach to the theory of knowledge moves through his conception of phenomenology. In the Logical Investigations (1900–1) and again in Ideas I (1913), Husserl develops a phenomenological theory of knowledge. Early modern philosophy explored the roles of reason and sensory experience in the foundations of our knowledge, looking toward the emerging sciences, especially physics, in which both mathematics and empirical observation were key. Husserl returns to these classical epistemological issues, armed with the results of his explorations in phenomenology. In this chapter we pursue Husserl's phenomenological theory of knowledge, considering its place in his overall system of philosophy.
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. What counts as knowledge, philosophers ask? Is knowledge justified true belief, as Plato considered, or something more? What do we know? What are the grounds or evidence for the knowledge we have? Is our knowledge founded primarily in perception (observation), or in reason (logic and mathematics), or in a combination of observing and reasoning? Is our knowledge derived from the authority of experts, or the practical wisdom of elders, or the spiritual wisdom gained in revelation or meditation? Is modern science the model of knowledge most expertly drawn? To what extent is our current knowledge dependent on the developments of science? What is the status of our everyday knowledge, which we take for granted as we go about our daily affairs?
Pursued since the dawn of philosophy, epistemology achieved its modern form, and arguably came into its own, in the 17th century, as philosophers began reflecting on the methods of modern science at its inception. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), René Descartes – mathematician, physicist, philosopher – reasoned that all of our knowledge must be founded on reason, if our knowledge is to be truly certain. His model was mathematics. Remember that it was Descartes who invented analytic or algebraic geometry (“Cartesian” geometry), which was to lead into the calculus and higher mathematics, all used extensively in modern physics from Isaac Newton on down. Rationalism thus pressed the case for reason as the basis of knowledge, as Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Baruch Spinoza, and others followed on Descartes' heels.
Early in the 18th century, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume argued, contrary to rationalism, that all of our knowledge is founded ultimately on sensory perception. Reason builds on the testimony of the senses, without which we would have nothing to reason about and no knowledge whatsoever about the world around us. Empiricism thus pressed the case for sensory experience as the basis of knowledge.
If we look to modern science as a paradigm of organized knowledge, we see a clear path of empirical investigation, where perceptual observation leads through complex reasoning into well-supported, often mathematical theories in physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, and so on. Empirical science follows inductive reasoning from observations of particular events to generalizations and ultimately into mathematical theories like Newton's law of gravity. But empirical science also follows deductive reasoning as in axiomatic geometry and higher mathematics, which are applied to observations in, say, Newton's mathematical theory of gravity. What we call the scientific method today is thus a synthesis of empiricist and rationalist aspirations.
By the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant was already trying to reconcile the rationalist and empiricist sides of our knowledge of the world, with Newtonian physics on his mind. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Kant's “critical” or “transcendental” philosophy sought the necessary conditions of the possibility of our knowledge. On Kant's analysis, our knowledge is essentially conditioned by the structure of our own minds. Human cognition is the product, specifically, of an application of concepts to sensations, producing “intuition” of things in the world, not as they are in themselves but as they appear. Concepts bring order to the barrage of sensory stimuli, as the mind applies basic concepts or “categories of the understanding” (noted in Chapter 4 of this volume) to the “manifold of sensibility,” the barrage of unstructured sensory data awaiting conceptualization as, say, I see this tree with green leaves below white clouds dotting the blue sky.
In the 19th century, before Husserl came on the scene, Bernard Bolzano's Theory of Science (1837) reinvigorated the rationalist side of knowledge in his theory of theories as systems of ideal propositions; on the empiricist side, Bolzano recognized singular “intuitions” of individual objects. Then Franz Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) elaborated an empiricist view enriched with the intentional structure of experience. The seeds were sown for a new kind of theory of knowledge. Drawing on Bolzano and Brentano, Husserl developed phenomenology, as his conception of “pure logic” led into the theory of intentionality, a theory of evidence, and therewith a phenomenological theory of knowledge.
By now you will have guessed that we have already seen key ingredients of Husserl's theory of knowledge. The Logical Investigations (1900–1) begins, in the Prolegomena, with a “theory of science,” a vision of systematic, objective knowledge that coheres as a body of propositions concerning a field of objects. Systematic knowledge begins, however, in more elementary experiences of perception or other forms of “intuition.”Accordingly, the Logical Investigations culminates in the book-length Investigation VI, titled “Elements of a Phenomenological Explication of Knowledge.”What makes Husserl's theory of knowledge phenomenological is his analysis of the structures of experience that form knowledge. On Husserl's account, knowledge is the product of two essential forms of experience: the intentional and the “intuitive” or evidential characters of experience – if you will, the rational and empirical “moments” of cognitive experience. Both intentionality and intuition play their roles in making knowledge possible: intentionality offers representation of things in the world (“that eucalyptus tree by the roadside”), while intuition provides evidence of the existence of such things (“I see that eucalyptus tree by the roadside”). Husserl characterizes intuition (Anschauung) as an experience in which an object is given “itself” with “intuitive fullness,” or “self-evidence,” as in seeing an object as opposed to merely thinking of it. Under intuition, however, Husserl includes not only sensory perception, in seeing physical objects (or hearing, touching, smelling, tasting things), but also “seeing” or having “insight” about essences or essential truths, and indeed “seeing” or having “insight” about meanings or intentional contents. Investigation V details the structure of intentionality, and then Investigation VI explores the role of intuition and intuitional meaning (Anschauungssinn) in the formation of knowledge. While Husserl's focus is on sensory perception as the paradigm of intuition, his account is generalized to allow for the intuitive evidence we experience in eidetic insight into the essences of objects and phenomenological insight into the essence of consciousness.
Husserl's account of knowledge continues in Ideas I (1913), with a sharper account of the relation between sensation and meaning in perception (§§84, 89–90).At the end of that book, after his mature account of phenomenology and intentionality is in place, after he has analyzed structures of both judgment and perception, Husserl turns to the “phenomenology of reason” – a phrase echoing Kant's “critique of reason.” In that context, he explicates the conditions of the possibility of knowledge in terms of the phenomenology of “intuition” along with intentionality. In the Cartesian Meditations (1931), Husserl gives more organization to his theory of intuition, distinguishing several types of “evidence” in intuitive experience. In notes collected as Experience and Judgment (1939/1948/1973), Husserl explores further the structure of sensory “experience” (Erfahrung, as opposed to Erlebnis, or “lived-experience”), and its role in supporting judgment, distinguishing perceptual judgment from perception itself: here is the first step toward knowledge, in the transition from seeing an object to seeing that the object is thus-and-so. Finally, in the Crisis (1935–8), Husserl elaborates on the role that everyday experience plays in our knowledge of the world around us, including our scientific knowledge, as we inherit a great deal of background knowledge from our surrounding culture. Husserl's phenomenology sidesteps skepticism by assaying the kinds of evidence that are possible in grounding our beliefs about the world, and by explicating the way our knowledge depends on everyday “life-world” experience. Here is a very different response to skepticism than anything in Descartes, Hume, Kant, et al.
Knowledge is not itself an act of consciousness. Rather, it is the accumulation of beliefs (states, not acts, of mind) formed through appropriate acts of judgment in the face of intuitive evidence, especially as we see things and reason and judge about them. As Husserl puts it in the Crisis (1935–8), our knowledge – from everyday knowledge to disciplinary knowledge in the sciences – lies in beliefs that are the “sediment” of prior intentional acts, most often those of our forebears. Think of our knowledge in geometry or carpentry or shipbuilding (or indeed philosophy). Assuming an ontology of intentional contents, what we know – our store of knowledge, if you will – consists in an accumulation of propositions supported by evidence, that is, propositions that are the contents of past judgments supported by perceptual observations or other intuitive experiences.
In Husserl's theory of knowledge, we find both rationalist and empiricist motifs. On the rationalist side, we observe three important strands of theory. First, there is Husserl's theory of logic as the theory of theories, stressing the rational order of a systematic body of knowledge, or “science,” in a given theory such as geometry, physics, or psychology. Here we find a traditional form of rational insight. Second, there is Husserl's theory of representation or intentionality, analyzing how various concepts or meanings, in language or in acts of consciousness, prescribe or represent appropriate objects in the world. Here we find the theory and use of phenomenological insight, in understanding the intentional force of the noematic sense in a given experience: if you will, “seeing” meaning and its intentional force. Third, there is Husserl's theory and use of essential insight, or Wesenserschauung, literally looking at or observing essences. In Chapter 3 we addressed logic, theories, meaning, and representation, while in Chapters 5 and Chapter 6 we addressed meaning, intentionality, and methods for explicating the intentional force of meaning in our experience (by the technique of bracketing). In Chapter 4 we surveyed the many types of essence (formal and material) that Husserl distinguished, noting his practice of Wesenserschauung, or seeing essences. It remains, among other things, to explore further the phenomenon of Wesenserschauung as Husserl characterized it, here within the context of his theory of knowledge. It's not so mysterious as it sounds: abstraction is something we do all the time, as we recognize similar features or forms in different concrete objects or events.
On the empiricist side of Husserl's epistemology, we find that, for Husserl, our knowledge of things in nature is founded on sensory perception; just as the empiricists said. However, on Husserl's phenomenological analysis, a perceptual experience is rarely (as some empiricists have held) a pure sensation of a sensible quality such as red. Rather, an act of perception (as in seeing a tree) is a fusion of sensation and conceptualization (“hyletic” sensory data and “noetic” interpretation: per Ideas I, §85). Indeed, sensation seldom occurs without that conceptualization whereby meaning is given to the incoming barrage of sensory data. Here Husserl modifies the empiricist story along lines drawn by Kant.
Kant's theory of knowledge sought to answer Hume's skepticism (among other things), as Kant distinguished phenomena and noumena, or things-as-they-appear and things-in-themselves, showing how we might know things as they appear but not things as they are in themselves. As we saw in Chapter 6, Husserl radically extends the notion of “phenomena” as “noemata,” or things-as-intended, taking the form of ideal intentional meanings. But Husserl rejected the Kantian notion of a Ding an sich, or thing-in-itself beyond the reach of empirical cognition. Despite flirtation with what looks like a form of Kantian transcendental idealism, Husserl developed a very different theory of the structure of cognition. On Husserl's analysis, perception proceeds through a noema (presenting “the tree as perceived”) and thereby reaches the existing thing itself (“the tree simpliciter”), provided the perceptual noema is intuitively supported or “fulfilled” by appropriate sensory data. Of course, the proper theory of intentionality was not yet available to Kant or to other epistemologists prior to Husserl's work in the wake of Bolzano and Brentano.
Husserl's theory of knowledge, then, moved beyond classical rationalist, empiricist, and Kantian models in several fundamental ways.
1 Unlike his predecessors, Husserl developed an articulate theory of intentionality, a theory of how meaning directs experience toward various things in the world. He used that theory in the analysis of both perception and empirical judgment based on perception, hence empirical knowledge of nature.
2 In Husserl's epistemology, we employ eidetic intuition or essential insight (Wesenserschauung), as we abstract and explicate the essence of various objects. Here Husserl goes beyond traditional empiricism, but also beyond a logic-centered rationalism, as his critics quickly saw. (Moritz Schlick, founding the Vienna Circle in the 1920s, explicitly attacked Husserl's notion of Wesenserschauung.)
3 In Husserl's epistemology, our knowledge of conscious experience depends on our own direct, subjective experience of consciousness. We can explicate the intentional structure of consciousness, and focus on the meanings contained in our experiences, Husserl proposed, through phenomenological reflection on our own experience, which we pursue by the technique of bracketing (see Chapter 6). Descartes, Hume, and Kant were all practicing rudimentary phenomenology in their diverse accounts of cognitive experience (in perception, reason, judgment), but Husserl insists that his predecessors had not yet mastered the practice of what we may call phenomenological or transcendental intuition, the source of properly phenomenological knowledge of consciousness.
4 Further, our knowledge of other people's experience, and of cultural objects (tools, artifacts, institutions, values), depends on our empathy with other people in various cultural activities. In Husserl's epistemology, empathy provides a kind of deferred direct evidence of others' experiences, as I can often “see” what another is feeling or thinking – though my knowledge of others is far from infallible.
5 In Husserl's epistemology, we explicate “formal” essences – Number, Individual, State of Affairs, and so on – through categorial intuition (as observed in Chapter 4). Correlatively, we intuit logical forms in propositions. Thus, in a special type of eidetic intuition, we “see” formal structures of objects in the world, structures that are semantically correlated with logical structures of meaning, reflecting our logical concepts of quantity, individual, state of affairs, and so on.
This kind of insight into formal ontological structure is perhaps the most radical and unfamiliar method in Husserl's toolkit. Yet it seems to be practiced on a daily basis by mathematicians, albeit without explicit ontology and epistemology. Or so the former mathematician named Husserl held as he launched his philosophy in the Prolegomena to the Logical Investigations.
Husserl's doctrine of intuition can be seen as a radical extension of empiricism, sweeping rationalism and empiricism together in a wide notion of intuition. Husserl remarks:
If “positivism” means so much as the absolutely presuppositionfree grounding of all sciences on the “positive,” that is, what is to be grasped originarily [originär: “originally,” i.e. intuitively], then we are the genuine positivists. In fact, we let no authority shrink the right to recognize all kinds of intuition as equally valuable sources for the justification for knowledge – also not through the authority of “modern natural science.”
(Ideas I, §20, my translation)
Empiricism becomes positivism when the model of knowledge is that achieved in the “positive” sciences, the natural sciences. For classical empiricists or positivists, only sensory perception provides basic justification for knowledge. By contrast, Husserl widens the notion of intuition to include not only perceptual intuition, but also eidetic intuition and phenomenological intuition.
As we explore the details of Husserl's theory of knowledge, we stress two themes: systematic theory and intuition. Through complex phenomenological analyses, Husserl explicates the structure of many, quite different forms of intuition, in which an object of appropriate type is given in a direct, evident, intuitive way.
Husserl does not assemble his theory of knowledge in one neat package. Rather, the elements of the theory are developed in various texts. We can map out a structure in his theory of knowledge, however, if we take his categorial ontology as a guide (drawing on Chapter 4). Accordingly, we shall structure his theory of knowledge as coordinate with his ontology. Different types of object in the world are known in different ways, but our knowledge of a given type of object always consists in propositions “sedimented” from past judgments supported by appropriate intuitive experiences.
In everyday English, we say someone has intuitions about impending events, or about other people, sensing their motives. In contemporary philosophy, we explicate our intuitions or intuitive beliefs about, for example, ethical principles or what counts as really knowing something. In logic, we consult our intuitions about which forms of inference are valid. In Husserl's idiom, however, “intuition” is a technical term with a special role in his phenomenology.
In Medieval Scholastic philosophy, the term “cognitio intuitiva” was introduced to mean direct cognition of something, as in visual perception. Subsequently, in the German philosophical tradition, “Anschauung” takes the place of the Medieval Latin term, and is translated into English as “intuition.” “Anschauung” literally means looking at something. Intuition provides direct knowledge of an object, without inference from other judgments. Thus, intuition provides basic knowledge, from which further inferences can be drawn. Visual perception is the paradigm of intuition, as when I see that tree. From that point on, however, theories of intuition vary. For Kant, intuition is a sensory-conceptual representation of a phenomenon. For Bolzano, intuition is a singular representation of an object. For Husserl, intuition covers a range of self-evident forms of experience, beginning with seeing a physical object before one.
In his phenomenological description of intuition, Husserl says that in a visual experience – such as seeing or touching a tree – the object is given “originarily” (originär) in its “‘bodily’ selfhood” (“leibhaftigen” Selbstheit) (Ideas I, §3). This “originary” character (a neologism) refers to the origin of knowledge in self-evident observation. What of the further characterization? It is natural to say that in sensory perception the object is experienced as “itself” “bodily” present; this is to say, I experience the tree itself in an embodied relation to me, that is, a causal relation to me. Think of the experience of touching a tree. Yet Husserl extends this characterization to all kinds of intuition, specifically to essential insight (Wesenserschauung), insight about an essence such as triangularity or treehood – or any of the types of essence we met in Chapter 4. In emphatic prose, Husserl writes:
The essence (eidos) is a new kind of object. As the given of individual or empirical [erfahrenden] intuition is an individual object, so the given of essential insight [Wesenserschauung] is a pure essence.
Here there lies before us not a merely external analogy, but a radical commonality. Essential insight is still intuition [Anschauung], as the eidetic object is still an object…. Empirical intuition, specifically sense experience [Erfahrung], is consciousness of an individual object, and as intuitive “brings it to givenness,” as perception … brings consciousness to grasp the object “originarily,” in its “bodily” selfhood [originär, in seiner “leibhaftigen” Selbstheit]. In exactly the same way essential insight is consciousness of something, an “object,” a something toward which its glance is directed, and what in it is “itself given” [“selbst gegeben”].
(Ideas I, §3, my translation)
Even objects dealt with in formal logic, he adds, “subjects of possibly true predications,” can be grasped in “bodily selfhood.” Strong stuff! Husserl's doctrine of essential insight, correlated with his doctrine of essence, met with stiff resistance, but Husserl insisted he had been badly misunderstood. As we explore the notion of intuition, we shall find that the practice of essential insight is not so bizarre as Husserl's rhetoric may suggest.
The heart of intuition, for Husserl, is “evidence” (Evidenz), that is, self-evidence. In Logical Investigations, he says an intuition is a “fulfilled” presentation of its object, that is, evidentially fulfilled, as a hypothesis or expectation might be fulfilled by observations. In Ideas I, he says that in intuition an object is given “originarily,” that is, with originating evidence, which provides the justification of knowledge. In Cartesian Meditations, he elaborates on types of “evidence.” As we shall see, Husserl distinguishes a variety of kinds or grades of evidence, often speaking of what is more or less “adequate” evidence. In English, we take evidence to be the claims offered in support of another claim or proposition: the witness saw the suspect leave by the back door, a damning piece of evidence. However, in Husserl's technical usage (playing off the English), evidence, or evidentness, is a phenomenological character of an experience. If I merely think, hypothetically, that the suspect left by the back door, my thought carries no evidence; but if I actually see him leave by the back door, my seeing this event is an evident observation. Indeed, the observation is self-evident, that is, its evidentness does not rest on inference from any other experiences or judgments. Intuitiveness consists in this character of self-evidentness.
On Husserl's analysis, an act of perception includes both a sensory moment and a noetic or meaning-giving moment (Ideas I, §85). In virtue of the sensory aspect, the experience is an evident presentation or intention of its object. We might say the sensory element “fulfills” the noetic or intentional element, and so “fulfills” the meaning in the experience, whence the experience has the character of intuitive “fullness” (compare Ideas I, §136). The intuitive “fullness” of an act of perception is this character of being evident, self-evident. In every intentional experience an object is “given,” that is, intended, and intended as such-and-such. But in intuition the object is “given” with evidence or fulfillment, that is, it is given intuitively, self-evidently, as thus-and-so. Investigation VI of the Logical Investigations works over this notion of intuitive fullness in great detail, emphasizing the fusion of the interpretive and intuitive components of an experience of intuition. This analysis carries over, with simplification, into Ideas I in the model sketched earlier.
Now let us turn to the noematic sense of a perception, the intuitive-perceptual sense presenting “the object as seen.” In perception, Husserl says, the object is intended or given “itself.” This means, I take it, that the experience is a “direct” presentation of the object. As Husserl explicitly observes, we use demonstrative pronouns when we express the content of a perception or perceptual judgment. We naturally say, as in the phenomenological descriptions developed in prior chapters, “I see that black bird” or “I see that that is a black bird” (to use Husserl's example). And the demonstrative pronoun “that” refers, Husserl says, “directly” rather than “attributively.” Just as the perception refers or intends directly rather than attributively, presenting “that …” rather than, say, “the object that is a black bird, about twelve inches high, making a sharp cawing sound, about fifteen feet in front of DWS at noon on 1 August 2005” (see Logical Investigations, Investigation I, §26; Investigation VI, §§4–5). Decades later, philosophers of language would study how a demonstrative works as opposed to a description. Thus, a definite description, such as “the author of Waverly,” refers by appeal to a property or cluster of properties unique to the referent (having authored the Waverly novels), whereas the demonstrative pronoun “that,” on a certain occasion of utterance, refers by appeal to the presence of the object before the speaker, often pointing at the object. When Husserl says the object is given “itself” or in its “‘bodily’ selfhood,” we can understand this best by considering how a demonstrative works. In seeing or indeed touching “that,” my experience presents the object itself, directly, and does so by virtue of its presence before me – my experience is pointing at the object right before me. The intuitive presentation of “that” object is then normally joined by a predicative presentation, thus, a visual presentation of “that black bird.”
From today's perspective, I propose, we can see in Husserl's account three distinguishing features of perception that qualify it as intuition: (1) The thetic character of a perception includes the character of intuitiveness, or evidentness, that is, intuitive fullness; (2) the noematic sense of a perception includes the demonstrative sense “this,” which presents the object directly, not attributively; (3) the conditions of reference or successful intention include the intended object's being present to the subject, that is, bodily present, located before the subject in space-time. (See D. W. Smith 1989 for an analysis, in my own terms, of several forms of “acquaintance,” what Husserl called intuition, elaborating similar phenomenological structures of “demonstrative” or “indexical” forms of experience.)
These phenomenological features of perception are specific to sensory intentional experience in a spatiotemporal setting. Other types of intuition, such as grasping an essence, will have to be described differently, yet so as to qualify as an intuitive presentation of an object “itself.”
“Seeing” or “looking at” essences – Wesenserschauung – may sound like a magical intellectual faculty. I send my mental periscope high into the Platonic heaven of eidos, I peer around, I “see” the essence Triangle, and I describe what I “see.” I “see” that, by essence, a triangle is a figure formed by three intersecting straight lines, which meet in angles of various possible sizes, where the sum of the three interior angles is 180°. Or I “see” the essence Tree, not any concrete tree, but the ideal form Tree. I “see” that, by essence, a tree has a trunk, roots, a number of branches, with branches of branches, where leaves or needles appear at the ends of the smallest branches. Or I “see” the essence Consciousness, whereby I “see” that, by essence, an act of consciousness is intentional, carries a meaning or noema that aims toward some object, and is experienced by a subject. But now I retract my eidetic periscope, I open my physical eyes, and over here I see a triangle painted on a canvas, while over there I see a tree…. But wait! Nothing like this picture of essential insight emerges as we read the details of Husserl's account of intuitive insight about the nature or essence of a triangle, a tree, an act of consciousness.
Ideas I (1913), we noted, opens with Husserl's account of essence (Wesen) and essence-insight (Wesenserschauung). This account is an amplified version of a piece of theory laid out (in a lengthy polemic) in the Logical Investigations (1900–1), where Husserl talks not of essence and essence-insight, but of “ideal species” and “abstraction” of species from concrete instances (Investigation II), and finally of “intuition” of ideal objects (Investigation VI). These terms suggest something more familiar than do “essences” and “seeing essences” – familiar, if not quite prosaic.
In Ideas I, Husserl coined a cluster of terms in his effort to characterize, phenomenologically, what we are calling (in translation) essential insight. He spoke of observation of essences (Wesenserschauung), knowledge or acquaintance of essences (Wesenserkenntnis), grasping of essences (Wesenserfassung), description of essences (Wesensbeschreibung), positing of essences (Wesenssetzung), and science of essences (Wesenswissenschaft) (see the index of the German edition). The term that achieved salience for some readers was Wesenserschauung, which sounds like “seeing essences.” But other of his terms are equally suitable, especially Wesenserfassung, “grasping essences.” Though we speak naturally of insight, we also speak naturally of grasping the nature (essence) of something – or, switching to another type of ideal object, grasping an idea or concept or meaning. What does Husserl's prior account of these things look like?
Investigation II of the Logical Investigations is titled “The Ideal Unity of the Species and Modern Theories of Abstraction.” Husserl sketches his own view and expounds it by contrast with nominalist views he rejects in the empiricists Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Mill. Here we cannot do justice to Husserl's argument over some 80 pages, but we can extract his key results: an ontological theory of universals as ideal objects, and an epistemological theory of abstraction whereby we know universals.
As we noted in Chapter 4, Husserl's theory of ideal species, later called essences or eidos, is a realist theory of what traditionally are called universals, that is, kinds, properties, relations – and, for Husserl, “formal” objects or ontological “forms” (see also Chapter 3 of this volume). Husserl argues at length against nominalism, the view that when we consider the members of a species there is no further object that is the species, there is only the name (perhaps a mental name or concept) we use to group the individual objects. By contrast, Husserl holds, positively, that species are objective, ideal objects, shareable by concrete things in space-stime but not themselves spatiotemporal. Above all, Husserl insists on the objective existence of species, arguing that we cannot avoid positing them. He seems to include numbers, sets, and other mathematical objects under ideal species. Also (in Investigation I), he takes senses or meanings to be ideal species of acts of consciousness (later, in Ideas I, he takes senses to be their own type of ideal objects, as we saw in Chapter 6). Husserl's discussion of species is interwoven with discussion of modern theories of abstraction, in a critique of views of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. He is particularly attentive to Hume, in a chapter called “Phenomenological Study of Hume's Theory of Abstraction.”
Take a ripe tomato. Husserl argues that we must distinguish the species Red, the instance of Red that is a moment of the object (here, the tomato), and the object itself. The species does not reduce to the collected objects that are red, or to the collected instances of Red (moments) in those objects. Nor does it reduce to an idea of the red in the object (as when I see the object as red), or to the meaning or concept of red, or to the expression “red.” Husserl criticizes the empiricists and nominalists for failing to recognize and distinguish these diverse entities. For Husserl, then, ideal species are not unfamiliar objects, though we must be careful to distinguish them from related objects of distinct ontological types.
How do we know species? Husserl approaches this question through a critique of empiricist notions of abstraction, focusing on Hume's theory of abstraction. For Hume, roughly, when we look at the tomato we recognize its resemblance to other red objects, and focus our attention on the resemblance. Thereby we abstract the species Red (or, for Hume, the idea of red) from a group of red things whose resemblance we recognize. Hume was on the right track, Husserl thought, but did not draw the required distinctions, and so did not offer an adequate phenomenology of grasping species. Husserl's own theory of our abstraction of species assumes the relevant distinctions. On Husserl's theory of intuition of species, then, I grasp the species Red by considering in imagination the similarities among various red objects, each bearing its own instance of Red. By abstraction from a variety of possible instances of Red in various objects, I grasp intuitively the species Red itself. This account of species abstraction, or intuition of ideal species, Husserl extends in Ideas I.
In Ideas I, Husserl characterizes the method of eidetic variation. In order to grasp the essence Red, I practice a form of imagination or “free phantasy.” I imagine varied instances of Red, imagining objects whose colors vary from Red (shading toward Blue or Yellow), and by abstraction I grasp the essence that is shared by those objects I imagine as red. Or consider the essence Triangle. I imagine varying shapes and judge which ones are triangles. From this imaginary group I abstract those features that I judge to be shared by triangles of varying type. In this way I generate the insight – I come to “see” – that, by essence, a triangle has three straight-line sides which form interior angles that sum to 180°. Or take the essence Tree. I imagine a variety of objects. If the object has no trunk, no limbs, no roots, I judge that it is not a tree. And so I judge intuitively, I come to “see,” that, by essence, a tree has a trunk, roots, branches, and so on. My judgments are supported by intuitive evidence – today we speak of “pattern recognition.” This sense of evidence qualifies the experience as intuitive.
In Ideas I, Husserl introduces this method of grasping essences in “free phantasy” immediately after introducing essential insight:
The eidos [Eidos], the pure essence [Wesen], can be exemplified intuitively in the givenness of empirical experience [Erfahrungsgegebenheiten], in such [givenness] of perception, memory, and so forth, but equally as well also in the givenness of mere phantasy [Phantasiegegebenheiten]. Hence, in order to grasp an essence itself and originarily, we can set out from corresponding empirical intuitions, but just as well also from non-empirical, non-existence-grasping, moreover “merely imaginative” intuitions [“bloss einbildenden” Anschauungen].
(Ideas I, §4, my translation)
Furthermore, Husserl holds that knowledge of essences does not in itself depend on any knowledge of facts (§4). This is a tricky point. Obviously, our ability to imagine objects under the relevant essence normally begins in actual experience of such objects. Husserl's claim must then be that once we have acquired knowledge of facts about objects under an essence, when we move on to grasp the essence itself, with the relevant sort of intuitiveness, then we may use phantasy or imagination alone. Our grasping the essence depends on our varying instances of the essence in imagination. The source of intuitive support that is relevant to grasping the essence, Husserl holds, comes from these experiences of imagination. To bolster his claim, Husserl refers to the geometer at work: it is through imagining possible instances of triangularity, not seeing actual triangles, that the geometer achieves insight about the essence of triangles. Later, turning to the essence of consciousness (§70), Husserl allows, interestingly, that phenomenological reflection can proceed by phantasy, reflecting on imagined acts of consciousness, just as well as on actual acts.
There are, however, grades of intuition of essences. As I develop my grasp of an essence, my intuitive knowledge of it expands. Yet most essences can be known only partially, and so not “adequately.” Specifically, Husserl says, “the essence ‘Thing’ [i.e. Material Thing in Nature] is originarily given, but … this givenness can in principle be no adequate [givenness]” (Ideas I, §149,my translation). Since our knowledge of things in the region Nature is empirical, we do not follow “free phantasy” alone as we develop our intuitive grasp of essences under nature, such as the essence Tree. We see and touch trees in everyday life, observing many features of trees around us; our botanist colleagues study trees in detail, as biologists expand our theories of photosynthesis, cellular activity, and much more; and evolutionary biologists expand our theories of how trees emerged on planet Earth. As our knowledge of various aspects of trees expands, our intuitive comprehension of what it is to be a tree expands. Where does imagination play in our intuitive grasp of, say, the essence Eucalyptus? Well, as we organize our extant knowledge about eucalyptus trees (drawn from perception and inference), we imagine varying properties, concluding that some properties are characteristic of eucalyptus and others are not, given our actual observations of such trees. Our observations lead us to conclude, as we vary characteristics in imagination, that individual trees may vary somewhat from the norm.
Thus, we must handle with care Husserl's insistence that imagination alone provides intuitive support for grasping such an essence. In this respect, Husserl's claim for free phantasy can be misleading. Clearly he assumes that we acquire knowledge about trees, and thus about the essence Tree, through perception. After we have acquired such empirical knowledge, we use “free phantasy” to sort out the structure of the essence Tree. But we could not, realistically, investigate the essence Tree by pure imagination alone.
However, in mathematical theories, where Husserl began his intellectual life, a “pure” mathematical theory is indeed produced, with intuitive support, in a system of axioms and theorems, by imagining how a “world” characterized by the theory would look. But a “material” ontology concerns objects we know by means other than pure imagination. Husserl's account of essences in the material regions of Nature, Consciousness, and Culture is not limited to insight gained from pure imagination.
Clearly, we are integrating Husserl's account of eidetic variation with his account of systematic theory construction. Intuition of essences, then, is not a simple, single experience of suddenly “seeing” how things are. It is, rather, an experience of grasping, with intuitive evidence, how things are, given prior experiences and background beliefs, many of which are part of our collective development of knowledge about objects falling under a certain essence.
Husserl's phenomenology of intuition is wider than we have seen so far, addressing quite a variety of experiences he classed as intuition. However, true to form, Husserl never collected these diverse results. I shall try to organize his results, as I understand them, drawing on fragments of theory scattered over works including Logical Investigations (1900–1), Time-Consciousness (1905–17), Thing and Space (1907), Ideas I (1913) and Ideas II (1912), and Cartesian Meditations (1931).
Intuitions, for Husserl, divide into two basic kinds: originary and reproductive. We have considered only originary intuitions so far. Originary intuitions, as the term suggests, serve as origins of knowledge. Reproductive intuitions, instead, reproduce forms of experience found in originary intuitions, and some serve as a sort of deferred origin of knowledge.
Originary intuitions include experiences of perception, essential insight, and phenomenological insight. Each of these types of experience presents its object in an originary, self-evident way. Perception presents things in nature, essential insight presents essences, and phenomenological insight presents acts of consciousness and their contents.
Reproductive intuitions include experiences of recollection, imagination, and empathy. Recollection (a special form of memory) presents past events, “reproducing” what I earlier perceived, or what I have earlier judged on the basis of perceptual evidence. Imagination presents possible objects or events, “reproducing” what I might see or judge (depending on the type of object imagined). Empathy presents another's experience “as if” one were experiencing it oneself. In this sense empathy “reproduces” in my experience the type of experience I take another to have. Husserl has a great deal to say about each of these types of experience, but we must rest content with a brief sketch of their role in epistemology.
We have indicated the roles of perception, judgment, and inference in knowledge formation. Memory too plays an obviously essential role in our knowledge: just consider the impact of memory incapacitation that follows brain damage or deterioration as in Alzheimer's. If Husserl is right about the role of imagination in essential insight, then we also rely on imagination insofar as we know the nature or essence of a type of object, say, a eucalyptus tree. We do not often phantasize explicitly about a tree in order to judge that it is a eucalyptus. But we understand that it would not be a eucalyptus if it dropped its long, grayish-green leaves and sprouted long evergreen needles, or if it sent roots down to the ground like those of a banyan tree, or if it blossomed with red roses. Imagination proposes these “unmotivated” possibilities, which our intuitive judgment quickly rejects. Husserl's theory of horizon (elaborated in Chapter 6) implies that our knowledge about familiar types of objects, such as a eucalyptus tree, depends on this capacity for imagination.
Particularly interesting is the role of empathy in our knowledge of others. When I see the sadness in another's face, I do not see her sadness in the way I see her furrowed eyebrows. I see – “physically,” as it were – the shape of her eyebrows. But when I see – immediately, evidently, intuitively – that she is sad, my experience is empathic. In a very articulate form of empathy, I place myself imaginatively in the other's place, so that in imagination I experience what she is actually experiencing. The English word “empathy” entered our vocabulary as a translation of the late-19th-century German term “Einfühlung,” literally feeling one's way into another's experience. Originally the term was used in literary criticism for feeling one's way into the emotional tone of a poem. The term then migrated into the nascent discipline of psychology. For social theorists including Wilhelm Dilthey, whom Husserl knew, the social or cultural sciences rely on empathy to develop an understanding (Verstehen) that is quite different from the kind of understanding achieved in physics. At any rate, Husserl picked up on the phenomenon of empathy and found in empathy a basic source of our knowledge about others. (Ideas II analyzes empathy. Stein (1916/1989) sharpens the phenomenology of empathy along Husserlian lines.)
Husserl defines intuition, we saw, as an evident experience of something “itself.” But Husserl distinguishes three importantly different grades of evidence: mere subjective certainty, adequacy or completeness of evidence, and apodicticity or indubitability. Perhaps the best account of these is in the Cartesian Meditations (1931). “Any evidence is a grasping of something itself …, with full certainty of its being, a certainty that accordingly excludes every doubt” (§6). Thus (in the first person): an evident experience is certain if I do not doubt the existence of the object posited in the experience. “Adequate evidence” is the ideal of perfection, as opposed to “imperfection” or “incompleteness, a one-sidedness … [in] ‘experience’ with unfulfilled components” (§6). Thus, an evident experience is adequate if I am intuitively given all aspects of its object, that is, all aspects of the intended object are presented evidently (as least certainly) – there is nothing further to be known about the object, there are no “hidden sides” to be ascertained. “An apodictic evidence, however, is not merely certainty of the [states of affairs] evident in it; rather it … [is] at the same time the absolute unimaginableness (inconceivability) of their non-being” (§6). That is, an evident experience is apodictic if I cannot doubt the existence and properties of the object presented in the experience, I cannot imagine their non-being (in the face of this experience). The Cartesian Meditations begin with Husserl's critique of Descartes' famous quest for “absolute certainty” in the Meditations (1641), and accordingly Husserl finds, phenomenologically, more types of evidence and more varieties of evident experience than Descartes had considered. Husserl will find that perception is certain but inadequate and dubitable, while phenomenological reflection is apodictic but inadequate, as we note later in this chapter.
Sensory perception is certain, but inadequate and nonapodictic. In the clear light of day, when I see that eucalyptus tree, I do not doubt what I see. But there are many aspects of the tree that are not presented, evidently, in my current experience: the back side of the tree I cannot see, its history and future are not presented in my current perception, and the intricacies of its biology are not presented in this perception. So my perception is far from “adequate,” in Husserl's sense. Nor is perception apodictic. As skeptics ancient and modern have long stressed, no matter how vivid this perception, I can doubt its deliverance on grounds that I could be dreaming. Or, to go with Descartes' “evil genie” argument, it is at least possible, so far as I know, that there is an evil demon who is causing this perception to appear in my mind though there is no tree before me. In a contemporary version of the argument, my perception could be produced, so far as I know, by someone manipulating the neural firings in my brain. Well, to this extent, I could doubt what I now see, that there is a eucalyptus tree with a certain appearance as presented in my current visual experience – this much is at least conceivable, so my experience is not apodictic.
As noted earlier, Husserl finds that our intuitions or intuitive judgments about “material” essences of things in nature are not adequate (Ideas I, §149). Not only are perceptions of individual things inadequate and dubitable, but insight about the essences of things in nature is also inadequate and dubitable. There is always more to learn about the essence of a natural kind such as Eucalyptus. If natural sciences are about essences under the region Nature, as Husserl holds, then of course all natural sciences are based in intuitive judgments that are not “adequate” in Husserl's sense: there is always more to learn about the essence of any natural kind. And in principle further evidence about natural essences could prompt revision of what we claim to know about them. Further, our intuitive judgments about cultural objects, and so about the essences of cultural phenomena, are also, obviously, not adequate. There is always more to discern about, say, the nature of our institutions, from national governments to universities to libraries and so on. Nor are such things known apodictically; we could doubt what we know about such institutions.
In Ideas I, Husserl crystallizes the phenomenology of evidence and adequacy in these terms:
To every region and category of purported object there corresponds phenomenologically not only a fundamental kind of senses (Sinnen), moreover propositions (Sätzen), but also a fundamental kind of originarily giving consciousness of such sense and, belonging to it, a fundamental type of originary evidence (Evidenz) …
Every such evidence – the word understood in our extended sense – is either adequate, in principle not to be further “strengthened” or “weakened,” thus without graduality of a weight; or it is inadequate and therewith capable of increase or decrease.
(Ideas I, §138, my translation)
According to its sense, or posited sense (proposition, in Husserl's special sense of the term), Husserl notes, a “thing” in nature can be given in perception only with inadequate evidence (§138). This principle lies behind the structure of the horizon of, say, seeing a tree (compare Chapter 6 on horizon). The inadequacy of perception even allows such radical revision, with further experience, that my perception can “explode” (§138), so that the sense in my experience now prescribes something very different, say, not a tree at all, but a soldier moving forward with arboreal camouflage.
Finally, what kind of evidence is there in the experience of phenomenological reflection? In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl recapitulates the way epoché, or “bracketing” the objective world, leads phenom-enological reflection to “transcendental subjectivity” (§8). Descartes was on the right track with “I think, therefore I am,” Husserl finds, … yet Descartes failed to make “the transcendental turn” because he believed that he had “rescued a little tag-end of the world” (§10), namely, the “pure ego,” the being who thinks, from which Descartes claimed he could ultimately deduce the existence of the rest of the world. Husserl goes on to distinguish the “pure” or “transcendental” I, pure subject of experience, from “I, this man,” with “a psychic life in the world” (§11). The distinction is not between distinct objects called “I,” but between distinct aspects or moments (instancing distinct essences) of the one object, I: my experiencing is one aspect or moment of me, my bodily shape is quite another, and the method of bracketing allows me to focus on my conscious experience as such (see Chapter 6 on bracketing and Chapter 4 on the ontology of aspects or moments). Practicing “transcendental” reduction, or bracketing, I reflect on my current consciousness. In this reflection, Husserl holds, I have apodictic evidence of my current experience (“I think”) and of my being (“I am”). Thus, “the sense of the indubitability with which the ego becomes given in transcendental reduction [= bracketing] actually conforms to the concept of apodicticity we explicated earlier” (§9), that is, the unimaginableness of my non-being, when I am having a conscious experience. In this Descartes was indeed correct, Husserl finds, provided we recognize the relevant distinctions of evidence. However, my phenomenological evidence of my experience is not adequate, for my memory of my past experiences in my stream of consciousness is not adequate (§9).There is more to my stream of consciousness than my current experience, of which I have apodictic evidence.
We depart the arena of evidence by noting an issue in grasping essences. Most essences, it would seem, are complex and can be grasped only inadequately (there is always more to know) and nonapodictically (further evidence may prompt revision). These limitations would seem to apply to essences of various types of experience, even though a concrete experience does not have hidden sides like a physical object – I live through the whole experience on which I reflect. The limits on our knowledge of most essences are indicated by Husserl's concern with “‘definite’ manifolds.” For, if our knowledge of a given essence is ideally expressed in an axiomatic theory about the field of objects exemplifying the essence (a “manifold,” recall, is the form of a field of knowledge), then for many or most essences we cannot expect complete knowledge (capturing a “definite” manifold). (Compare Ideas I, §72, on definite manifolds, and then §§73–5 on phenomenology as “descriptive theory of the essence of pure experiences.”) In the 1930s Kurt Gödel would produce his incompleteness theorems, to the effect that no theory rich enough to express arithmetic can be complete (that is, there are propositions in the theory that are true but cannot be derived from axioms in the theory). Gödel's results, though directed at certain mathematical theories, are likely symptomatic of the limits of our knowledge of most essences, including essences of acts of consciousness.
In Husserl's day the term “science” (Wissenschaft) meant any systematic body of theory or knowledge about a given domain of objects. In today's idiom, “the sciences” include physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and so on. But in the wide sense of the term found in Bolzano and Husserl, more abstract disciplines also count as “sciences”: geometry, arithmetic, algebra, logic, and even ontology, epistemology, and phenomenology count as sciences when practiced systematically. Philosophy itself Husserl held to be a “strict science” when practiced appropriately. Accordingly, Husserl's theory of knowledge begins, in the Logical Investigations, with the theory of theories, or sciences in this wide sense.
Knowledge in a systematic theory takes the ideal form, for Husserl, of a system of propositions unified in two ways: (1) they represent and characterize objects in a given domain or field and (2) they hang together deductively, ideally forming an axiomatic theory like geometry. Here is the model of knowledge sketched in the Prolegomena of the Logical Investigations (see Chapter 3 in this volume). However, what makes a theory a body of knowledge, rather than a theory of merely possible objects of some type, is the way its propositions are supported by evidence, thus by intuition in Husserl's sense. The full course of the Investigations was required to formulate, in Investigation VI, a theory of knowledge, where “intuitive” or “evident” intentional experience transforms a mere theory into a body of knowledge.
Which comes first, ontology or epistemology? To say what exists, we must know what exists; to say what we know, we must say what exists to be known. The answer to this “chicken-or-egg” problem lies in Husserl's theory of dependence: dependence can run in two directions at once. In Husserl's philosophical system, then, ontology and epistemology are interdependent. So let us use Husserl's ontology (Chapter 4) to help sort out his epistemology. Broadly, the essences or types of object Husserl distinguishes are isolated by essential insight or abstraction. So, as Husserl develops his ontology of formal and material essences, he is practicing his epistemology of essential intuition or abstraction.
Basically, Husserl holds that knowledge consists in beliefs “sedimented” from appropriate judgments supported by intuitive experiences. Let us apply this theory to our knowledge of objects in certain domains. Specifically, let us look a bit more closely at what Husserl would count as systematic knowledge of objects in the three “regions” of Nature, Consciousness, and Culture.
Our knowledge about objects and events in Nature begins with sensory perception, perceptual intuition. We form perceptual judgments about things we see, hear, touch, and so on, and we draw inferences to form further judgments. Thus, I see that tree, I visually judge that that is a tree, I infer and so judge that it is a juniper tree, given its similarity to other trees that people have told me are junipers. Here we are working at the level of everyday knowledge, often guided by what many others have learned. The natural sciences – physics, chemistry, biology – proceed from such everyday knowledge. Scientists carefully observe the behavior of physical objects and events, and form hypotheses of a more abstract character, often using mathematics to characterize the essence of the relevant phenomena. And so, over the long haul, we or the experts accumulate a systematic body of theory supported by observational evidence. Philosophy of science studies the details of this methodology in the special sciences, notably physics. Husserl's epistemology emphasizes the process of abstraction whereby we characterize the essence of things in nature. For Husserl, the process by which we accrue scientific knowledge is a complex form of coming to grasp the essence of, say, gravity, electromagnetic attraction, or the neuronal storage of information in human memory. Each particular theory in natural science articulates the essence of a given domain: Newton's theory of gravity describes the essence of attraction between massed bodies; Einstein's general theory of relativity describes the essence of space–time; Freud's theory of repression describes the dynamic by which conscious ideas are pressed into the unconscious; and so on. Practicing scientists will not describe their work in Husserl's terms, but Husserl will articulate what natural scientists do according to Husserl's theory of scientific knowledge. (Yes, that epistemological theory is a theory, according to Husserl's Bolzanoesque theory of theories.)
Now, our knowledge about experiences in Consciousness is quite different. As we considered in Chapters 5 and 6, Husserl offered a complex theory of our knowledge of consciousness. We “live” our own subjective experiences, or acts of consciousness. We observe that our experiences are typically intentional, a consciousness of something. If we bracket the question of the existence of the objects of our experience, then we turn our attention to the experiences and their contents or meaning. We then reflect on the essence of these experiences, and so on their meanings, considering what their meanings purport to represent. As practicing phenomenologists, “scientists” of consciousness, we thus develop a theory of the structure of consciousness, supported by the intuitive evidence of our experiencing various acts of consciousness and reflecting on them. In this way we abstract and describe or analyze the essence of consciousness. If natural science breaks down into the more special sciences of nature, phenomenology – the science of consciousness as experienced – breaks down into more special phenomenological sciences: the theory of perception, the theory of judgment, the theory of emotion, the theory of consciousness of time, the theory of consciousness of space, the theory of “intersubjectivity,” and so on. As we noted earlier, Husserl allowed that our intuitive evidence of the structure of consciousness is, as Descartes proposed, apodictic, albeit in a sense refined by Husserl's phenomenology of grades of evidence.
Our knowledge of cultural objects is quite different. Artifacts, institutions, laws, and social organizations are objects in Culture. What they are, their essence, depends on social or collective activities. Our knowledge of cultural objects depends on how we understand what others in our culture think, desire, and will. This level of cognition begins in empathy, or Einfühlung, literally feeling my way into the other's experience. As we grow up within a culture, we learn a language, we learn everyday behaviors (“manners”), we learn informal rules (when to speak or bow, when not to), we learn formal laws (drive on the right side of the road, walk on the right side of the sidewalk when encountering other walkers), and so on. What we learn – our knowledge of culture – derives from others and is learned from others. Take a very simple example. I see an object, and I perceptually judge that it is a fork, something to eat with, especially useful in handling solid foods. How do I know it is a fork? Clearly, this item of knowledge is “sedimented” from the activities of my forebears, and I learned this item in my very early years. In Husserlian terms, I “saw” that forks are used for eating, and so I abstracted the essence of forks from my observations of others using them to eat. These observations depend on an elementary knowledge of what others are doing and trying to do, a comprehension Husserl would describe as empathy with intentional acts of others. Here is a special type of “seeing,” insight into the experience of others: “I see [empathically] that she wants to use that fork to eat.” Without this empathic knowledge of others' experience, I cannot have the simple experience of seeing something as a fork, and thus have the knowledge that this object is a fork. Complex cultural objects include social organizations such as families, communities, professions, or nations, and ultimately cultural events or processes such as the history of the Roman Empire or the Ming Dynasty. As we develop a systematic theory about, say, culinary tools or empires, our knowledge of culture divides into the special cultural or social sciences: sociology, anthropology, history, cultural criticism in the arts, and so on. In Husserl's epistemology, each cultural theory involves intuitive evidence from empathy but proceeds to abstract the essence of some domain of cultural objects or activities. Thus, we find, say, the theory of the historical development of eating utensils, the “social contract” theory of modern states, the Marxist theory of capitalist exploitation, the theory of laissez-faire economics, the theory of postmodern architecture, or what have you. (Ideas II, 1912, focuses on empathy, including consciousness of my or another's “living body” as opposed to “physical body.” The Crisis, 1935–8, extends Husserl's account of the life-world, which is “there for everyone” and includes cultural phenomena dependent on empathy.)
For Husserl, we saw in Chapter 4, the sciences indicated above develop “material” ontologies. That is, they characterize the “material” essences of objects in domains falling under the regional essences Nature, Consciousness, and Culture. These sciences are constrained, in Husserl's system, by a formal ontology characterizing such “formal” essences as Individual, Property or Essence, State of Affairs, Number, Manifold, and so on. For Husserl, forms or formal essences define “formal” objects, including numbers, essences, states of affairs, and so on. The special formal sciences, including arithmetic, logic, and so on, develop more specific areas of formal ontology. These formal sciences are grounded in intuition of formal essences. If we return to Husserl's categorial ontology, distinguishing such formal essences as Individual, Property, State of Affairs, Number, Manifold, and so forth, as mapped out in Chapter 4, we find that the ground of these categorial distinctions lies in working intuitively with case studies from which we are to abstract these formal essences and recognize distinctions among them. These intuitive observations are systematized in the category scheme we assembled in Chapter 4. In Husserl's epistemology, these observations are themselves produced by practicing essential insight.
Husserl's notion of the life-world marks an important and novel contribution to epistemology. All of our knowledge depends, in a specific way, on our everyday background knowledge of things in what Husserl calls “the surrounding world of everyday life,” the Lebenswelt or “life-world.” This principle has consequences for our specialized knowledge in the sciences, and arguably it blocks the rise of skepticism.
Husserl outlines the notion of Umwelt, my surrounding world, in Ideas I (1913) and Ideas II (1912). A few years later he adapts the term Lebenswelt, borrowed from the social theorist Georg Simmel. Ultimately, he puts the notion to extended use in the Crisis (1935–8), the posthumous volume fully titled Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl's epistemological concern in the Crisis is the way in which mathematical physics depends on the life-world. He is concerned to avoid the loss of meaning that he sees resulting from the “mathematization” of nature, which idealizes and abstracts away from our basic knowledge of things in everyday life.
Now, the life-world is not an ontological structure, a domain distinct from, say, the natural causal order. There is only one world, which includes literally everything. Rather, the life-world is a phenomenological structure: it is the world as experienced in everyday life. That is, the life-world is not a distinct domain of objects, but a range of noematic sense, embracing the types of sense presenting objects as we experience them in everyday life. Hence, Husserl speaks of our understanding “ruling as constitutive of the always already developed and always further developing meaning-configuration ‘intuitively given surrounding world’” (Crisis, §28). The Umwelt, the Lebenswelt, is thus a structure of meaning, and it includes the idea of intuitive givenness. (Recall Husserl's doctrine of constitution and horizon, explored in Chapter 6.)
Husserl launches his conception of transcendental phenomenology, in deasI, with the opening salvo: “I am conscious of a world, endlessly spread out in space, endlessly becoming and become in time” (deasI, §27). This world, he explains, is “continuously present [orhanden,” and “[t]hereby this world is for me not there as a mere act-world [Sachenwelt], but in the same immediacy as value-world, goods-world, practical world [Wertewelt, Güterweld, praktische Welt]” (§27, my translation). “This world,” Husserl writes, is “the world in which I find myself and which is at the same time my surrounding world [Umwelt]” (§28). All of my experience takes place in this world, my Umwelt, and all objects of my consciousness I experience as residing in my Umwelt. Notice that this structure is defined indexically or ostensively as “my” world and “my surrounding world.” Thus, I experience objects as objective matters of fact, but also, in many cases, as bearing value and as part of my practical activities. For instance, I see the clouds gathering on the horizon (a matter of fact), but I also see the beautiful sunset (a matter of value), and I also see and grasp and wield this shovel as I dig in the garden (a practical affair). Whatever the essence of these things may be (in Husserl's categorial ontology), the ways in which I experience them, through the indicated noematic sense, define their place in my Umwelt. Even ideal objects, viz. essences and meanings, are appropriately related to objects in my Umwelt, being essences or meanings of things in my surrounding world.
The Crisis weaves a fascinating, complex tale, from which we here draw only a fragment. Husserl proposes a diagnosis of a cultural problem stemming from modern physics, an intellectual crisis in “the European sciences.” Starting with Galileo, Husserl avers, modern physics has “mathematized” the essence of nature (§9), increasingly idealized and abstracted from the ordinary things around us. Relativity theory and even quantum mechanics were already launched in Husserl's day. Husserl refers to Newton, Planck, and Einstein at the outset (§1), and later to Einstein and Michelson (§34b). Moreover, general relativity theory was given a mathematical formulation by Hermann Weyl, who drew inspiration from Husserl's transcendental phenomenology (see Ryckman 2005). There is nothing wrong with this mathematical modeling of nature, for Husserl the lapsed mathematician: physics is a great achievement, well founded on intuitive evidence. The problem is rather a lacuna in our epistemology, in our phenomenological theory of knowledge in mathematical physics. We have lost track of the phenomenological link between our knowledge in physics (§9) and our intuitive experience of things in our “surrounding world of life” (§§28ff.).
We might put the “crisis” in this way, assuming the full range of Husserl's system (appraised in prior chapters). Our experts in physics have developed a mathematical theory (a system of propositions) about the essence of space–time and thus of physical objects and events occurring in space–time. In everyday life, of course, we do not experience familiar objects as having the mathematized essence posited in our judgments in physics. We experience things as “that tree,” “that falling apple” (indicative of gravity), “those lines of refracted light” (observed in the experiment of quantum mechanics where an electron beam is split into two). The perceptual observations that serve as empirical evidence for our physical theories are themselves, in Husserlian analysis, experiences of objects as they appear in our familiar Umwelt. The objects we so observe are not experienced, in these perceptions, as having the mathematized essences posited in our theories. In our theoretical judgments, however, we posit objects as having just these mathematized essences – and not as having the essences posited in our everyday perceptions. There are, accordingly, two distinct ranges of meaning that represent things in nature: the meanings in our theoretical judgments in physics, and the meanings in our everyday life-world experiences, including the perceptions that serve as observational evidence for our theoretical judgments. And these two ranges of meaning represent objects as having two distinct ranges of essence. Enter the crisis: we really do not understand how things in nature can have both of these very different essences, or how the everyday world – including ourselves and our surroundings – finds its place in mathematized nature. As Husserl remarks, pointedly, “Since the intuitively given surrounding world, this merely subjective realm, is forgotten in scientific investigation, the working subject is himself forgotten” (Crisis, “The Vienna Lecture,” Appendix I: 295). As Martin Heidegger might have put it, in the practice of science we have “forgotten” the meaning of the being of the everyday. (Husserl's Crisis may have been prompted partly by Heidegger's Being and Time [1927/1962], though the Crisis draws on the phenomenology of Ideas I [1913] and Ideas II [1912].) Physicists and philosophers of physics have worried long over the disconnection between our everyday image of the natural world and our theoretical constructs in relativity theory and quantum mechanics. With Husserl's theory of the life-world, set in the context of his phenomenology, ontology, and epistemology, we find a particularly astute formulation of the problem.
The gap between theory and experience is felt not only in the empirical science of physics. Already in ancient times, Husserl finds, geometry moved away from its “origin” in everyday perception and, for that matter, carpentry (see Crisis, “The Origin of Geometry,” Appendix VI). “We are constantly conscious of the world … as the horizon of our life,” Husserl writes, and we are “coconscious of the men on our external horizon in each case as ‘others.’… It is precisely to this horizon of civilization that common language belongs” (p. 358). Euclidean geometry was developed by others in ancient times, and the written results guide us today. Indeed, we cannot do mathematics without the aid of a symbolic language, much less pass it on to others. When the Pythagorean theorem was written down, the original knowledge became passive, “sedi-mented,” awaiting reactivation through reading and thus thinking through the theorem and its proof, intuitively. As Husserl writes:
Accordingly, then, the writing-down effects a transformation of the original mode of being of the meaning-structure, [e.g.] within the geometrical sphere of self-evidence, of the geometrical structure which is put into words. It becomes sedimented, so to speak. But the reader can make it self-evident again, can reactivate the self-evidence.
(Crisis, 1935–8: 360)
In reading geometry, then, we become intuitively aware of the content of a theorem, but we are also dimly aware of its historical origin. “Making geometry self-evident, then, whether one is clear about this or not, is the disclosure of its historical tradition” (Crisis, 1935–8: 371).
In Husserlian terms, the origin of an idea, say, in geometry – in history, in civilization, in culture – is “predelineated” in the meaning-content of the idea. And so, the historical origin of the idea lies in the horizon of our experience in practicing geometry. This historical element of meaning, Husserl notes, plays a neglected role in epistemology: “Certainly the historical backward reference has not occurred to anyone; certainly theory of knowledge has never been seen as a peculiarly historical task” (p. 370). Husserl is emphasizing not merely the fact of the history of geometry – its development in a language, a civilization, a cultural formation – but also its role in knowledge itself. As we explicate the Pythagorean theorem, making it self-evident to us as we read and think, we are reactivating the “sedimented” theoretical knowledge established with intuitive evidence by Euclid et al. This reactivation is part of the phenomenology of practicing geometry. Still prior to the early geometers' theorizing, however, lay the practical activities of building things with boards featuring straight lines. A technique of measuring, Husserl notes,
is always already there, … pregiven to the philosopher who did not yet know geometry but who should be conceivable as its inventor. As a philosopher proceeding from the practical … to the theoretical world-view …, he has the finitely known and unknown spaces and times as finite elements within the horizon of an open infinity.
(Crisis, 1935–8: 376)
And so, in geometry as in physics, our theory rests on the intellectual labors of others and this work depends on practical, everyday activities such as, for geometry, making and measuring straight lines on boards with which to build cabinets or houses.
A general epistemological principle is emerging: all of our knowledge, from everyday perceptual judgments to theoretical judgments in geometry and in physics, depends on a background of implicit knowledge about the world around us. This background consists largely of what others have learned in theory and practice before us, a background that spreads outward in horizon from our knowledge of “my surrounding world.”This background takes the form of my implicit sense of the life-world, my Umwelt. As Husserl puts it, the life-world is characterized by “presuppositions,” forms or constructs of sense (Sinnesgestalten, Sinnesgebilde), which are “anonymous” in origin yet serve as “one single ground [Grund]” of all the sciences, of all knowledge (Crisis, §29). Thus, my Umwelt is defined by a complex horizon of meaning that represents possibilities for familiar things in my surroundings. This range of meaning conditions my knowledge of everything, beginning with my knowledge of things around me. And most of this knowledge, embodied in the relevant range of meaning, is drawn from a long tradition or history of knowledge established long ago by others. That knowledge is extant, “sedi-mented,” in my culture, carried forward in language and other social practices, without which we could not develop further knowledge in everyday life or in the special sciences. Without which that is, our knowledge depends (ontologically) on this background sense of our surrounding world (see D. W. Smith 2004: ch. 5, for my own, Husserl-friendly account of the background).
In this way, Husserl's phenomenological theory of knowledge is extended in his phenomenological analysis of the sense of the life-world and its role as a ground of knowledge.
Classical epistemology was often a response to the problem of skepticism, the challenge that we can never really know, with certainty, what we claim to know about the world around us. Husserl was not much concerned with skepticism, presumably because his phenomenology of evidence portrays a more realistic account of knowledge than the target of classical skepticisms. In any event, Husserl's theory of the dependence of knowledge on life-world experience arguably undercuts the force of skepticism.
Quite simply, if all of our knowledge depends on our sense of things in the life-world, then the skeptic's challenge cannot get off the ground. How can I be absolutely certain, the skeptic asks, that there are birds and trees and other people in my surroundings? How can I be certain, moving onward, of the observations on which scientific knowledge is based, and how then can science be certain? How can I be certain of the theorems of geometry? And so on. The Husserlian answer is: I cannot even frame these questions without presupposing that my surrounding world is of a certain character and structure. Philosophers from David Hume back to the ancients observed that skepticism may be compelling in the philosopher's study but cannot be practiced on the streets. If Husserl's phenomenology is right, however, the skeptic cannot press his case even in the study, for the sense of the Umwelt cannot be suspended even in the quietude of the study.
But doesn't Husserl's method of bracketing or epoché precisely put out of play the everyday assumption that the world around me exists, the “general thesis of the natural [everyday] standpoint”? (Compare Ideas I, §§30–2.) How can my sense of the life-world then remain in play as we proceed with transcendental phenomenological analysis of experience? Well, after introducing the notion of the life-world, Husserl presses his method of epoché (Crisis, §§35–49). He now proposes a variation on the method, a step-by-step procedure that he thinks will avoid a misleading “Cartesian” form of epoché (where we move in one step from everyday acceptance of the world to reflection upon experience). We shall not go into these procedures on this occasion. The point to note is Husserl's result: phenomenological analysis (following appropriate procedures) finds that every intentional experience has a noematic sense that predelineates a horizon emanating from my implicit, presupposed sense of “my surrounding world.”
The skeptic can pretend that this sense of Umwelt is not there, or is something we must abstain from accepting until we have certainty of it – which, the skeptic charges, we will never have. (Recall that the Greek term “epoché” is drawn from the ancient skeptics, meaning to abstain from belief.) But this move by the skeptic is a move in bad faith. Careful phenomenological analysis, Husserl finds, reveals an implicit back-reference to “my Umwelt,” a presupposition we are unable, in good faith, to deny. In the practice of phenomenology, I turn from my experience of things in the world around me to my reflection on experience. I then analyze the meaning or noematic sense in a given form of experience. And I find, as a result of phenom-enological analysis, that this meaning is linked with my sense of the life-world, a meaning-structure that is always with me. The skeptic is in the same boat, and his/her skepticism founders on the ground of the life-world. Even as s/he questions this meaning-structure, s/he presupposes it – or so the counter-skeptical argument goes.
(A related line of argument about our background claims and practices can be drawn from Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty [1949–51/1972]. Compare Searle 1983: ch. 5 on “the background”; and D. W. Smith 2004: ch. 5 on “background ideas,” including practices, extant in our culture. Compare Friedman 2001 on relativized a priori assumptions in our knowledge of space–time. Friedman's line of argument indicates, I would argue, how we can change our fundamental background assumptions, but only while keeping our ship of everyday life-world knowledge afloat.)
Husserl developed a phenomenological theory of knowledge featuring an account of systematic knowledge forming a proper theory, an analysis of various forms of “intuition” (Anschauung) or “evidence” (Evidenz), and an account of the role of the life-world in the formation of knowledge. Husserl's epistemology thereby synthesized and transcended prior epistemological paradigms of rationalism, empiricism, and Kantianism, extending his phenom-enological theory of intentionality into a theory of knowledge.
For Husserl, knowledge is formed in acts of rational judgment supported by evident or intuitive experience, that is, intuition. Systematic knowledge in the particular sciences takes the form of a theory, a system of propositions that characterize a particular domain of objects and are bound together by deductive consequence and (where appropriate) probabilistic “motivation” (according to Husserl's account of “pure” logic). But the propositions in a theory count as knowledge only when judged with the support of evidence, or intuitive “fulfillment,” which comes in experiences such as perception.
On Husserl's analysis, intuition consists in an intentional act of consciousness that has a thetic character of intuitiveness or “evidence”: that is, intuition consists in a self-evident intention of an object (or state of affairs). Sensory perception is the paradigm of intuition. Thus, a visual perception is a fusion of intentional and sensory components in the experience, a fusion of noesis and hyletic or sensory “data.” Thanks to its sensory component, a visual intention of an object is evident, or intuitively “fulfilled.” Here we see the rational and empirical aspects of knowledge, in the conceptual and sensory aspects of an experience, say, in seeing a eucalyptus tree and visually judging that there is such a tree at a certain place.
While perception is the paradigm of intuition, Husserl recognizes several distinct types of intuitive experience, including sensory perception, essential insight, categorial insight, and phenom-enological insight. He talks of “seeing” in all these cases, but these forms of experience are quite different, as his analyses show.
Essential insight (Wesenserschauung), or eidetic intuition, consists in “seeing” something concerning a particular essence, say, “seeing” that a triangle has three interior angles or “seeing” that a tree normally has branches. For Husserl, eidetic variation in imagination leads to such insight. Thus, I consider a variety of putative examples of, say, a triangle or a tree, and in reflection I vary the putative properties of these objects. Thereby I come to “see” that by its essence a triangle has three interior angles (otherwise it is not a triangle), or that by its essence a tree normally has branches. By such imaginative variation, I come to “see” the similarities between relevant instances of the essence in question, that of a triangle or that of a tree. (Today we call this pattern recognition.) “Categorial” intuition, for Husserl, consists in “seeing” something concerning an ontological category (a formal essence), especially the ontological form State of Affairs. When I judge that a state of affairs obtains, say, where I judge that that tree is a eucalyptus, I “see,” categorically, that the object and its species are joined into the state of affairs that this object is of that species. Logical and mathematical intuitions turn, similarly, on “seeing” aspects of logical and mathematical form.
An important type of intuition for Husserl is phenomenological intuition, or insight about the structure of consciousness. The technique of bracketing turns my attention from objects in the surrounding world to the structure of my consciousness of such objects. Then, in eidetic variation, I reflect on a particular form of consciousness, say, seeing a eucalyptus tree, considering its intentional essence, which can be shared by this experience and others. Thereby I come to appreciate the structure of such an experience: I “see” that consciousness is, in this case, a consciousness of something, a sensory-intentional experience, a visual presentation of “that eucalyptus tree,” and so on. Knowledge in phenomenology is formed through this practice of eidetic phenomenological intuition or reflection. Here we see Husserl's epistemology folding back on his phenomenology.
On Husserl's analysis, then, evidence is formed in various ways for judgments about different kinds of things. In mathematics, logic, physics, biology, psychology, or phenomenology, we proceed from appropriate types of intuitive experience. Through reasoned theory-formation, we build up knowledge about the types of object presented through such intuitive experience. As we reason further about objects in a given domain (numbers, logical proofs, gravitational forces, evolving species, intentional experiences), we rely on rational insight about reasoning, which may itself be made the theme of rational insight in pure logic. In this way, Husserl's epistemology is interdependent with his phenomenology, his ontology, and his logic.
For Husserl, all of our knowledge, in various domains, depends in certain ways on our everyday experience of the surrounding world, the life-world. Mathematical sciences abstract away from features of things in the world as we know them in everyday life. This “mathematizing” of things in nature can be problematic, Husserl argued in the Crisis (1935–8), as we lose touch with our familiar world, which includes ourselves and our own experience. To appreciate the ways in which the special sciences depend on our everyday forms of experience is thus to tie the sciences of mathematics, logic, physics, biology, and psychology (today, we would add neuroscience) into the structure of our own experience, a structure we come to know through the practice of phenomenology.
Fisette, Denis. 2003. Husserl's Logical Investigations Reconsidered. Dordrecht and Boston, Massachusetts: Kluwer Academic Publishers (now New York: Springer). Contemporary essays on the Logical Investigations, several of which address epistemological issues.
Friedman, Michael. 1999. Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A study of Carnap's logical empiricism or logical positivism, indicating relations to Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.
——. 2001. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford, California: CSLI Publications. A revised Kantian epistemology of “relativized” synthetic a priori knowledge of space–time, considering Einstein's theory of the geometry of space–time, allowing for relations to phenomenology.
Mulligan, Kevin. 1995. “Perception”. In B. Smith and D. W. Smith, editors, The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 168–238.
Nelson, Alan, ed. 2005. A Companion to Rationalism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Introductory essays on rationalism.
Richardson, Alan W. 1998. Carnap's Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A study of Carnap's logical empiricism and its historical background, including the role of Husserl's phenomenology.
Roy, Jean-Michel. 2004. “Carnap's Husserlian Reading of the Aufbau.” In Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein, eds. Carnap Brought Home: The View from Jena. Chicago and LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court. A study of Carnap's logical empiricism in relation to Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.
Ryckman, Thomas. 2005. The Reign of Relativity: Philosophy in Physics 1915–1925. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. A study in the philosophy of relativity theory, addressing our knowledge of space–time and including relations to Husserlian transcendental phenomenology.
——. 2006. “Husserl and Carnap.” In Richard Creath and Michael Friedman, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Carnap. Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press. A study of the relations between Husserl and Carnap on the “constitution” of the world and the role of elementary experience in the formation of knowledge.
Smith, A. D. 2003. Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. (Series: Routledge Guidebook to Philosophy). London and New York: Routledge. A study of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, developing the Cartesian side of Husserl in that work and drawing a strong idealism from the work.
Smith, David Woodruff. 2005a. “Rationalism in the Phenomenological Tradition.” In Alan Nelson, ed. A Companion to Rationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. A study of rationalist elements in Husserl's phenomenology and in other phenomenologists' work.
Willard, Dallas. 1984. Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. A study of principles of epistemology, drawing on Husserlian views in the Logical Investigations.
——. 1995. “Knowledge.” In B. Smith and D.W. Smith, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A study of Husserl's theory of knowledge.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1949–51/1972. On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper & Row. First published by Basil Blackwell, 1969, from notebooks written in German during 1949–51. Wittgenstein's last work, developing a critique of skepticism, reflecting on G. E. Moore's refutation of skepticism (“Here is a hand,” of that I am certain). Wittgenstein's account of background practices and propositions is similar to Husserl's prior account of the life-world and its role in grounding everyday knowledge.