suspend all the intentions and convictions of the natural attitude; this does not mean that we doubt or negate them, only that we take a distance from them and contemplate their structure. Husserl calls this suspension the phenomenological epoché. In our human life we begin, of course, in the natural attitude, and the name for the processs by which we move to the phenomenological attitude is called the phenomenological reduction, a ‘leading back’ from natural beliefs to the reflective consideration of intentions and their objects. In the phenomenological attitude we look at the intentions that we normally look through, those that function anonymously in our straightforward involvement with the world. Throughout his career, Husserl essayed various ‘ways to reduction’ or arguments to establish philosophy. At times he tried to model the argument on Descartes’s methodical doubt; at times he tried to show that the world-directed sciences need the further supplement of phenomenological reflection if they are to be truly scientific. One of the special features of the natural attitude is that it simply accepts the world as a background or horizon for all our more particular experiences and beliefs. The world is not a large thing nor is it the sum total of things; it is the horizon or matrix for all particular things and states of affairs. The world as noema is correlated to our world-belief or world-doxa as noesis. In the phenomenological attitude we take a distance even toward our natural being in the world and we describe what it is to have a world. Husserl thinks that this sort of radical reflection and radical questioning is necessary for beginning philosophy and entering into what he calls pure or transcendental phenomenology; so long as we fail to question our world-belief and the world as such, we fail to reach philosophical purity and our analyses will in fact become parts of worldly sciences (such as psychology) and will not be philosophical.
Husserl distinguishes between the apophantic and the ontological domains. The apophantic is the domain of senses and propositions, while the ontological is the domain of things, states of affairs, relations, and the like. Husserl calls ‘apophantic analytics’ the science that examines the formal, logical structures of the apophantic domain and ‘formal ontology’ the science that examines the formal structures of the ontological domain. The movement between focusing on the ontological domain and focusing on the apophantic domain occurs within the natural attitude, but it is described from the phenomenological attitude. This movement establishes the difference between propositions and states of affairs, and it permits scientific verification; science is established in the zigzag motion between focusing on things and focusing on propositions, which are then verified or falsified when they are confirmed or disconfirmed by the way things appear. Evidence is the activity of either having a thing in its direct presence or experiencing the conformity or disconformity between an empty intention and the intuition that is to fulfill it. There are degrees of evidence; things can be given more or less fully and more or less distinctly. Adequation occurs when an intuition fully satisfies an empty intention.
Husserl also makes a helpful distinction between the passive, thoughtless repetition of words and the activity of explicit judging, in which we distinctly make judgments on our own. Explicit thinking can itself fall back into passivity or become ‘sedimented’ as people take it for granted and go on to build further thinking upon it. Such sedimented thought must be reactivated and its meanings revived. Passive thinking may harbor contradictions and incoherences; the application of formal logic presumes judgments that are distinctly executed. In our reflective phenomenological analyses we describe various intentional acts, but we also discover the ego as the owner or agent behind these acts. Husserl distinguishes between the psychological ego, the ego taken as a part of the world, and the transcendental ego, the ego taken as that which has a world and is engaged in truth, and hence to some extent transcends the world. He often comments on the remarkable ambiguity of the ego, which is both a part of the world (as a human being) and yet transcends the world (as a cognitive center that possesses or intends the world). The transcendental ego is not separable from individuals; it is a dimension of every human being. We each have a transcendental ego, since we are all intentional and rational beings. Husserl also devoted much effort to analyzing intersubjectivity and tried to show how other egos and other minds, other centers of conscious and rational awareness, can be presented and intended. The role of the body, the role of speech and other modes of communication, and the fact that we all share things and a world in common are important elements in these analyses. The transcendental ego, the source of all intentional acts, is constituted through time: it has its own identity, which is different from that of the identity of things or states of affairs. The identity of the ego is built up through the flow of experiences and through memory and anticipation. One of Husserl’s major contributions is his analysis of time-consciousness and its relation to the identity of the self, a topic to which he often returns. He distinguishes among the objective time of the world, the inner time of the flow of our experiences (such as acts of perception, judgments, and memories), and a third, still deeper level that he calls ‘the consciousness of inner time.’ It is this third, deepest level, the consciousness of inner time, that permits even our mental acts to be experienced as temporal. This deepest level also provides the ultimate context in which the identity of the ego is constituted. In one way, we achieve our conscious identity through the memories that we store and recall, but these memories themselves have to be stitched together by the deepest level of temporality in order to be recoverable as belonging to one and the same self. Husserl observes that on this deepest level of the consciousness of inner time, we never have a simple atomic present: what we come to as ultimate is a moving form that has a retention of the immediate past, a protention of that which is coming, and a central core. This form of inner time-consciousness, the form of what Husserl calls ‘the living present,’ is prior even to the ego and is a kind of apex reached by his philosophical analysis.
One of the important themes that Husserl developed in the last decade of his work is that of the life-world or Lebenswelt. He claims that scientific and mathematical abstraction has roots in the prescientific world, the world in which we live. This world has its own structures of appearance, identification, evidence, and truth, and the scientific world is established on its basis. One of the tasks of phenomenology is to show how the idealized entities of science draw their sense from the life-world. Husserl claims, e.g., that geometrical forms have their roots in the activity of measuring and in the idealization of the volumes, surfaces, edges, and intersections we experience in the life-world. The sense of the scientific world and its entities should not be placed in opposition to the life-world, but should be shown, by phenomenological analysis, to be a development of appearances found in it. In addition, the structures and evidences of the lifeworld itself must be philosophically described.
Husserl’s influence in philosophy has been very great during the entire twentieth century, especially in Continental Europe. His concept of intentionality is understood as a way of overcoming the Cartesian dualism between mind and world, and his study of signs, formal systems, and parts and wholes has been valuable in structuralism and literary theory. His concept of the life-world has been used as a way of integrating science with wider forms of human activity, and his concepts of time and personal identity have been useful in psychoanalytic theory and existentialism. He has inspired work in the social sciences and recently his ideas have proved helpful to scholars in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.
See also BRENTANO, INTENTIONALITY , KANT , PHENOMENOLOG. R.So.