Polk on Augustine and Time

In a 1991 article in Augustinian Studies, Danne W. Polk talks about Augustine, Husserl (and to a lesser extent Heidegger), phenomenology, theological anthropology, and the relationship between time and eternity. And because I have written posts and a paper or two about all of them, it seems only fair to write one more. Allow me to begin by summarizing Polk's paper. It is a phenomenological anthropology in which Polk puts the time-awarness of human beingness under the microscope. And, after examination, Polk contrasts it with the being of God so that the being of God is revealed as the ground of the becoming of everything else. Here is a rough outline (Heideggarian language added by me in square brackets):

1. Human beings are time-trapped creatures [da-Sein]; God is not
2. As bodied things, humans beings interact with the world from a particular point of view [Geworfenheit, thrownness]; God sees it all
3. Human beings interact with all things as they arrive and disappear in the flow of time [held out into the nothing]; All things are present to God
   • Attention, expectation, and memory
4. For human beings, the present is not an objective point but a subjective synthesis; God's eternity is timeless
   • A critique of Aristotle's objective and static model of time
5. God's being supports beings; eternity is the hub of time's wheel

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Human Beings are time-trapped creatures; God is not

The way human being are in the world is tensed. We move. We have extension. There is a a before and an after, a future that flows into a past. Time is dramatic; time is storied. Our lives are stories, and we tell stories about our lives. Polk says that Aristotle described a cosmic or objective time existing outside us. But Augustine, and much later Edmund Husserl and other phenomenologists such as Heiddeger and Merleau-Ponty, did not understand time like that. They said time is intimate and basic to human experience. Time is subjective to us, an insight that Husserl attributed to Augustine's Confessions.

Temporality (pro tempore)--what Augustine called "subjective time" and what Husserl called "immanent time"--is so close to us that any attempt at uncovering the essence of the human person, or in more modern terms, a description of human existence, must include an equal attempt at a personal or 'authentic' portrayal of the way time in fact appears to us. For Husserl, this amounts to a 'pure' description of how 'external' or 'transcendent' objects come to be constituted within the continual flow of experience. . . . [Later, Heidegger would say that the] human subject as it exists in time (or as time) is . . . the phenomenological question par excellance.

If Aristotle is right about time being objective, we cannot know. How could we know? We have no access to objectivity. But we know time because we are time. "This field of presence is not the presence of God, but rather, it is the presence of ourselves in the existential unfolding of our own experience" (66).

And why are humans so trapped in time? We are so because our bodies fix us in place. Our bodies locate us. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is … to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.”[6] We cannot know nor do we experience time as an objective whole, but only in our fixed locatedness. This qualifies all human knowing.

Things come and go

Time, then, cannot be understood objectively. We only understand it from our perspective. And the same goes for everything else. Things come into our awarness--they come in from the future--and they pass out again--they recede into the past. Objects take time to be. "Neither thoughts nor objects are able to stand still, at least not in the radical sense that it would take to understand the object as God understands it."

Objects (including human beings) are 'measured' by birth and death. That is, nascency and finality are the limits or boundaries between which the process of becoming takes place. These limits, and what goes on between them, keep us from knowing the object (or person) as a whole. . . . And it is this existential situatedness which marks off the contrast between time and eternity. (67)

Attention, expectation, and memory

So, then, our perception of an object is achieved by a synthesis in the mind. "Consciousness is a 'bond' which holds the object with its elements of being and non-being together (Husserl's Zeiterlebnisse, internal time-consciousness). We give conscious attention to things (for Husserl, intentionality). We anticipate or expect them. And we hold their passing by us in memory until they are gone into nothingness. Trying to hold anything in stasis, in an unmoving now, is impossible. The now is too thin, too transitory. We synthesize to form a whole. "Memory is the power of synthetically preserving the meaning of an object as it takes its time to make an appearance" (75). Memory is the subjective form of time. Through anticipation and memory, the mind dilates. The sliver of the present is thickened to behold the world. Say a friend recites a psalm. "We do not receive all the words and silences at once, but gather them together in our mind to make a meaningful and understandable unity which fills itself out in its passing, moving from anticipation into the present and then into the past." In the psalm, "each moment exists in relation to all the others." (71)[2] Attention is necessary for this. Without attention, there can be no unity of experience.[1] The whole appearance takes time. Things occur in the realm of becoming, not in a fixed point of time, no matter how slight.

God's Time / Human Time

Objectivity, such as Aristotle's present now, is unavailable to us. Aristotle presumed a now or a present moment as an objective point. Standing apart, high on a height, the world could be examined objectively. But, of course, there is no now from which Aristotle may stand objectively and judge the world. Such objectivity could only be achieved if we could stop time's flow. And that, for Augustine, would be to step into eternity, for only God sees things as they are.

What seems to be present if we could stop the flow is eternity, stillness, sameness, it is the absolute ground of God. But for us, the flow of time continually pushes us off the center point of the exact now. (75)

Augustine said that eternity hides behind the flow of time. And when we raise the question of objectivity (or, rather, when we ask the question about the difference between objectivity and subjectivity), we stand at the rift between being and becoming. Augustine would say that we ask even how time and eternity are compatible, and with that, whether it is possible for God and creation to interact at all.[3]

Being and Becoming

Underneath this reflection on phenomenological, subjective time and experience versus Aristotle's objective time is the deep problem of how being and becoming might connect. Aristotle's objective now was upgraded by Augustine into God's timelessness, an eternity that for timely thing is like a distant star peeking out between rolling clouds. Nothing moves for God. Worlds stand still. Unchanging eternity supports and gives meaning to finitude and change. Eternity supports faith.[4] Consider this Lenten collect:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

The thing is, Augustine's Neoplatonic metaphysics have been severely challenged in the twentieth century. There is a great suspicion that says this entire machinery of God's eternity is imported from Greek metaphysics, not the Bible. It is an ontology or onto-theology, they say, that has exposed Christian metaphysics to a host of dangers and defeats under the withering blows of Enlightenment ideas, under Spinoza's interrogation of substantia and Kant's critiques.[5] Many say its should be abandoned. A new metaphysics and a new doctrine of God should be built. I do not know. To run the other way seems to me to run into panentheism and process theology. Centuries of theological ground would be overturned. And God would not be eternal but everlasting. God is then not being but the most becoming of all becomings. God comes to resemble modernity; God becomes the wave that has us all.

Also to be considered is hamartiology. Augustine's teaching that sin (αμαρτια) is not being is, to my knowledge, the most useful understanding of sin that we have. [Augustine equates temporality with fallenness. "The experience of time indicates that the soul is 'distended,' fallen from the otium, the restful contemplation of eternal truth, into the busy negotium of temporal activity." (Robert O'Connel Art and the Christian Intelligence in Saint Augustine 72.] If being is eliminated as a category to Christian metaphysics, then this helpful explanation of how sin works as disorder is abandoned as well.

Therefore, I hardly know what to do. This is a major question that I have not yet solved. And, the thing is, I have done twenty years of work in an attempt to try and solve it! I'm afraid it is beyond me to understand the metaphysical philosophy necessary to choose wisely. So where does this leave things? I have only the incarnation. Augustine sought answers everywhere but in the narrative life of Jesus.

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Danne W. Polk. "Temporal Impermanence and the Disparity of Time and Eternity" Augustinian Studies 22 (1991) 63-82.

See the pattern Opening a Closed Circle for God || Creation; Eternity || Time.

Works Cited

Augustine. Confessions
Ibid., De Musica
Edmund Husserl. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
Ibid., Phenomenological Psychology
Ibid., Ideas
Maurice Mereau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception
Heidegger. Being and Time

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[1] Paying attention--allowing something to unfold itself under sustained contemplation--is learning to see things coram Deo in the light of the resurrection. This is the theologian's calling a thing what it is. This is what the arts help us to do. Individually, we will never see a thing as it is [its absolute quiddity] with even a fully restored imago. But the community can together over time begin to take steps to reflect God's complete knowing. We are allowed, by grace, to name the cosmos. Human beings are Michelangelo, seeing the David inside the stone. / Here is where I can connect with the contemplative tradition, with the arts, with the ethics of being for others (Bonhoeffer or even Levinas), an ethics that gives others the attention/the respect to become what they are. Simone Weil's work on attention is worth noting. And the scientific method comes sheepishly to the table.

[2] Augustine is reminding me--such as how each and every moment in his psalm singing exists in relation to all the others--of Leibniz's Monadology. In his speculative metaphysics, the cosmos is made of innumerable points called monads. Each monad reflected from its position the entirety of the cosmos. Every monad forms an absolute relation with the others, yet each is its own individual thing. Each has its particular perspective. Each is its own center of the map of the whole. There is absolute individuality and absolute relation. Polk refers to the Confessions (XI, 18): "An essential difference between eternity and temporality is that eternity has no particular perspective while temporality is always situationally located." For more on Leibniz, see my introduction to his Discourse on Metaphysics.

[3] Augustine drew a line between everlasting being and finite non-being. God was on one side; creation on the other. Now quoting from Polk (69) "Being," he thought, "is what it is because of itself, and time at best is only an image of the eternal sameness of Being. This means that objects are not only inadequate because of the way they appear, but because they lack the quality of true existence, 'for what is forever changing is not, since it does not abide.' But objects in the world do abide for a time, they are given a quasi-existence in 'my' time, and it is in this sense that an object is 'not wholly without being; rather, it is not supremely existent.' In this way, earth and sky exist as objects for me. In a sense, they are intimations of objects, subtle and delicate announcements of stability, which even though inadequate, participate in the ontological categories of the good and the beautiful. [Elsewhere, Augustine refers to time as a trace (vestigium or copy (imitatio) of eternity.] Still, in reference to subjective time, the world and things exist, but this realm of becoming is basically and essentially a lack of immutable Being. Unlike the objects of creation, Being has perfect self-identity which, for Augustine, is none other than the absolute being of God. By this ultimate standard, temporal objects are equivalent to nothingness just as our knowledge in comparision to God is equivalent to ignorance." Later Polk says "Augustine does not hold that objects are ever 'really real,' becuase all things are created, except for God, therefore all things are in some way mutable. That is, all things lack Being. (City of God VIII, 6). "Objects do show themselves, but they do so in time where faculties such as memory and expectation must be employed in order to hold the object together." (78) This makes objectivity a problem. // C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce comes to mind. As does Einstein's universe, where everything is exactly this: moving and subject to constant entropy. God, however, calls order from dissolving chaos. This order needn't be thought of as unchanging Being. Perhaps it need only be good enough, and that is as much as any created thing may be. // I cannot help but quote another lengthy bit from Polk--and I quote this because I hear its echo in liturgy even though it is talking about Augustine's view that the flow of time reflects Being's influence in its going:

In his early work, De Musica, Augustine does portray time as an image of eternity, but he moves away from this view toward an exploration of a radical difference between time and eternity in Confessions: 'times are ordered and made and changed, imitating eternity as they do when the turn of the heavens comes back to the same state and the heavenly bodies to the same place, and in days and months and years and centuries and others revolutions of the stars obey the laws of equality, unity, and order. So terrestrial things are subject to celestial, and their time circuits join together in harmonious seccession for a poem of the universe. (VI, 11.29)

Note also how the entire machinery of Augustine's anthropology of anticipation and memory come together in the singing of a psalm (Confessions XI, 28):

Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from my province of expectation and relegated to the past now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past. As the process continues, the province of memory is extended in proportion as that of expectation is reduced, until the whole of my expectation is absorbed. This happens when I have finished and it has all passed into the province of memory.

[4] Because temporality has its source in eternity, God's providence makes from flux his economy--the fortunes of our lives included. // Remember that, like Plato, Augustine believed in the natural immortality of the soul. That belief is the (pagan) flaw in the Western mystical tradition. Because their anthropology is flawed and their exegesis is at best dated, how can they be guides for spiritual practice? For ethical practice, of course, but not for guiding the soul. Augustine wrongly taught an inward journey because the soul participated in God's eternity. Perhaps a robust pneumatology might alter the flooring but keep the walls in place?

[5] See the posts Onto-Theology and Its Fate; On Panenthism; The Three Options; Heraclitus's Chiasmus as a philosophical step toward sacrament; You have to set aside a block of time; Padgett versus Wood on time and eternity; Hannah's Natality and Juergen's Novum.

[6] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. by Thomas Baldwin (Routledge: London, 2004), 93.

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Excursis: By reading this article, I am set up to make a leap forward. I am set to unify two arguments that, until this point, I had always considered very different. These arguments are arguments about time and arguments about interpretation. The former argument is represented by Augustine and phenomenology. The latter is represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer and hermeneutics. I can now bring them into relationship withone another in a vertical and a horizontal. Phenomenology occupies the vertical around the question of God's being; hermeneutics occupies the horizontal with ethical praxis at the center. Both are, of course, united in the one living One. He occupies both and transcends each. At the juxtaposing center is the perfect quiddity of shalom.

scrap of notes from April 2005

For the sake of memory and chronology, here's what I'm working on right now.

First, I'm very slowly beginning to read the early twentieth century French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). I'm digitizing an introductory monograph of his for inclusion in Project Gutenberg. Bergson's works were published in French just before the turn of the century and, up until WWI, he was a world-star of academia. A 1913 announcement that Bergson would be lecturing caused the New York's Times Square's first traffic jam. Indeed, Bergson is experiencing a renaissance in phenomenology circles, and especially among film theorists such as Gilles Deleuze. French thinkers as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Lévinas acknowledge his influence on their thought. There is something in him about the image and its permanence through change. I don't know enough to even know why I want to know. I'm just following the tip of my nose and seeing where it all goes.

Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, is beautiful! He is to the twentieth century what Kant and Hegel are to the nineteenth. I'm teasing apart the eleventh edition of his 1929 address "Was ist Metaphysik?" In eight or nine pages, he overthrows the Enlightenment projects "certainty" and announces the hermeneutical nature of theology up to the present day. Marvelous! In that one essay--as fundamental as Renee Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy--Heidegger cracks the solid wall of modernism and opens a space for the suspicion-of-supicion called postmodernism. It is really exciting, but slow going. I only have a few minutes a day to devote to the few pages a day I can cover. And it is not uncommon to review.

Additionally I'm discovering what I believe could be the beginning of my first pursued publication/article. The theme is the nakedness of Christ. I believe that research will show that Christ was crucified naked, yet the Gospels do not directly mention this, nor does any treatment in art or film of which I am aware. Being the second Adam, there is something here, a parallel to the innocent nudity of our first parents. And, note that he appears clothed after the resurrection. Paul, too, talks about our present nakedness and a longing to be clothed. Nakedness in the OT is always bad, connected to adultery (idolatry), but it seems that there is a change in that--a restoration of it. And this theme can easily branch out into discussions of the human gaze, our own embodiedness (and shame), even philosophically there is a motive of conceal/reveal; known/unknown; there is something about the difference between voyeurism and the gaze of love. I mentioned to L/ the other day, thinking about this, that Jesus's nakedness (for I am assuming at this point, albeit prematurely, that he was naked on the cross) was the nakedness of a groom who presents his body lovingly to his bride, whereas the world sees through the eyes of humiliation and rejection. It quakes with fear at the exposure of its own nakedness. [A later addition: this would also figure into media studies where people reveal and conceal themselves through media.]

I'm also playing with ideas about a unique method for writing theology modeled on the improvisational community-making methods of jazz. As in music composition, I would like to propose a fundamental motive and build my paper out of its development just as if it were a musical composition. I want to think of theology from the perspective of the liberal arts, rather than syllogistically like a math problem or taking a cue from Quintillian's rhetoric. I want it to welcome, receive, and serve as a vehicle for the opening up and uncovering of human being-ness (there's the Heidegger.) We should read a theological text as much like a work of art or a musical score as a "logical argument." People are not argued into the Kingdom as much as they are drawn as the Spirit opens their eyes to the beauty of the gospel. In that case, the choice is obvious. It is the choice for oneself as one was created to be, and the giving up of fantasies about personal divinity.

Anyway, as soon as I'm done with this review, I'm going to get back into Greek during the day and devote next Tuesday to beginning the Biblical/exegetical historical-critical research on the nakedness of Christ. Since the gospels do not say (they turn away, really, viewing the crucifixion with their eyes shut to a large extent), I have to be able to build a pretty solid case if I'm going to rest an entire argument on the nakedness of Jesus. As to why this theme comes to me--this theme of the nakedness of Christ--I have no idea. It just bubbled up two or three weeks ago.

See, my heart says that I'm tired of reading secondary sources. I need to stop "throat clearing" as Dr. Lim calls it, and pick up my own pen, whether I'm totally ready or not. I will even go so far as to say I'm "called" to this, like a missionary is called overseas. It burns away in my mind and my heart night and day, and even obstructs my reading: "Why are you reading this? This is not your work. Why are you following this argument? It is not your argument. It is time, time to find out who you are. What do you have to say for yourself? It is time: do it now, before you become forever lost to yourself and become a parrot and a servant of the ideas that others are having. You will be forever reading, forever questioning, but arriving nowhere. You will be growing, but to where? From where? What is your offering? What do you bring? Do you even have your own questions any longer? Do it now."

What is Epoché ? Hopkins speaks, pt 1

At the center of Burt C. Hopkin’s article “Husserl’s Epochē: Theory, Praxis or Something in Between?”[1] is an attempt to define the epoché of Edmund Husserl and, in doing so, to reassert the foundational importance of Husserl’s phenomenological method for modern epistemology. In essence, then, Hopkins is interrogating the first principles of philosophy itself.

Husserl claimed that “phenomenology is the method of rigorous science”--and what else is philosophy? Isn’t philosophy by definition the critique of knowledge? Again, the epoché, said Husserl, is the method of phenomenology. So then, phenomenology is epistemologically dependent upon the epoché. Therefore, an analysis of the epoché is an analysis of phenomenology’s claim to be philosophy. To analyze the epoché is to raise the question of philosophical viability. Such is Hopkins’s aim. His article seeks to justify Husserl’s claims, both to be a philosopher and to provide a fundamental philosophy. Its conclusion will recommend or decry Husserl’s phenomenology for the practice of modern philosophy.

From the beginning, Hopkins endorses Edmund Husserl with the honorific "Philosopher." But on what basis? “Because,” writes Hopkins, “he did not manifest the unquestioning understanding of oneself that always exhibits a failure to comprehend one’s own presuppositions and thus a failure really to grasp what one believes one knows.” Again, in the matter of Husserl’s critique of other doctrines, Hopkins repeats:

Rather than rest content with an unquestioning understanding . . . [Husserl] tirelessly interrogated the presuppositions proper to the conceptuality of each by confronting the latter [concepts] with the contents that fill them in [presuppositions].

Thus, Hopkin’s bid for elevating Edmund Husserl to Philosopher rests on the latter’s ceaseless interrogation of the presuppositions underneath every claim of knowledge he could discover in himself and in others. Hopkin presents an epistemology.

Again and again throughout his article, Hopkin presents knowledge as an aggregate of what and how. He writes, “To ask of anything “what it is” already involves, which is to say, already presupposes, some kind of access to that which we are interrogating with respect to its what.” To ask what something is proves inseparable from the question of how such knowledge is acquired. It is a fundamental question about first principles.--No!--It is a first principle for the interrogation of any claim to know and, indeed, for recognizing knowledge when it is obtained. 'Knowledge means seeing that the contents that our concepts presuppose are in harmony with our presuppositions that our concepts really presuppose such contents.' To know is a harmony derived from the synergy between concept and presupposition. Hopkin's definition is straightfoward enough, but by praising Edmund Husserl with the laurel he risks his entire argument.

If one is a philosopher, then one has something to teach, something which can be learned. So if Edmund Husserl is a philosopher, then he must have something to teach, and Hopkin claims that he does: the epoché. But can we learn the epoché? Is it something which can be taught? And here is the risk: The answer is “yes” only if we already have access to it. Bluntly, we can only learn about the epoché if we already know it, if what it is arises from our own innate presuppositions. But this is absurd! How does one learn anything, if what is learned is already known? And what does that say about teaching? Who, then, may teach? Is Husserl such a one? Is he, as Hopkins claims, a philosopher, if not a philosopher among philosophers? Hopkins refers his readers to Plato’s middle-dialogue about human excellence, the Meno, as he begins to answer these questions.[2]

In the Meno, Socrates refuses to separate the question of what something is from the question of how it is taught. Human excellence is not just the doing of excellence the being of being excellent. They two are inseperable. The teaching of human excellence, then, is not like learning a method, but more like the invocation of a new state of being. The point Socrates is making is that only one who already possesses human excellence (through a knowledge of its form, according to Socrates: a gift of the gods) has the know-how (phronesis) to invoke it in another human being. The knower of the form, the true philosopher, can, by dialectic (ἔλεγχος), cause the hearer to recollect their own knowledge of the form. Any real understanding of things must be based on a knowledge of the universal behind them. This sounds like philosophy!

So then, Hopkin’s claim that Husserl is a philosopher is only true if Husserl is, in fact, a philosopher, where a philosopher is recognized by their ability to make others into philosophers. Picking up on the definition above, this means that Husserl should be able to make others into those who have knowledge, and thus can make proper judgments about knowledge. Husserl claims the epoché does this, and so Husserl can only be a philosopher if he can lead those seeking to become philosophers to discover the epoché already within themselves. So the field in question becomes the content of human beliefs.

At bottom, says Husserl, there is the world. The world is the thesis of human experience. The world does not show up like anything else. It is unmediated and already there, that which is native to all experience. The world is the unsurpassable horizon for all human experience and the durative element of them all. Human belief in the world is elemental, and, therefore, Husserl calls all fruits of this belief, every experience and question which assumes the world, the natural attitude.” Hopkins writes:

The existence of the world is accepted by immediate experience as both what it is, that is, as something that is “on hand” for experience, and as how it is, that is, “always already there” as the unsurpassable horizon for whatever else shows up in experience. . . . the positing of the world thesis does not show up as a presupposition, but as the way that it, i.e., the world, is. (emphases mine)

More to come...

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[1] Hopkins, Burt C. “Husserl’s Epoché: Theory, Praxis or Something in Between?” in Essays in Celebration of the Founding of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations. ed. Cheung, Chan-Fai, Ivan Chvatik, Ion Copoeru, Lester Embree, Julia Iribarne and Hans Rainer Sepp. Web-published at www.o-p-o.net, 2003. Accessed September 1, 2005.

[2] Cf. Peter King's introduction to his translation of Augustine: Against the Academicians and The Teacher (Hackett, 1995) as well as his article, "Augustine on the Impossibility of Teaching". Also Michael Mendelson ""By the Things Themselves": Eudaimonism, Direct Acquaintance, and Illumination in Augustine's De Magistro" Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (Oct. 2001) and Han-liang Chang "Paradox and the Elenchus in Plato's Meno, Augustine's De Magistro,and Gongsun Long's Jianbailun (Discourse on Hardness and Whiteness)" (Chinese characters might jam pdf).

Note the previous entry in this series, What is Epoche? The Greek Skeptics

What is Epoché ? The Greek Sceptics.

Arcesilaus was the sixth head of Plato's academy, who turned the academy in a sceptical direction. After Plato's death, the headship of the academy passed to a series of men who developed metaphysical and ethical systems inspired by the positive arguments contained in dialogues such as the Republic and the Phaedo. Arcesilaus, however, turned away from such system-building and instead spent his energies in attacking the arguments of others. According to Cicero, the aim of such attacks was to produce epoché, or suspension of judgment.

Epoché (ἐποχή) in Greek philosophy means suspension of judgment, a principle originally espoused by the non-dogmatic tradition of sceptical philosophy at the ancient Greek Academy. Sceptics adopted an attitude where, by opposing appearances (objects of sense-perception) to judgments (objects of thought), they sought a moderate approach to the problem of knowledge which would allow them to obtain a life characterized by peace of mind. Against the dogmatists, philosophers who claimed to know the truth (where even pure nihilism is a dogmatic position), sceptics held all truths gingerly. They believed the problem of knowledge to be insoluble. Therefore, they changed every truth into a proposition or hypothesis. They arrived at this attitude by contemplating antitheses. Given a proposition, they would oppose an equal proposition. The resulting collision would serve to banish dogmatism and cultivate doubt. As Sextus Empiricus wrote: "The main basic principle of the Skeptic system is that of opposing to every proposition an equal proposition; for we believe that as a consequence of this we end by ceasing to dogmatize."

Now the moment of opposition, the moment that, when controversy arises, all actions are suspended for the sake of contemplation, that moment they called epoché. In that moment, an attitude of noninvolvement should be adopted. There is suspension. Within the epoché, the skeptic avoids affirming or denying the truth of any statements about the actual nature of things. The epoché highlights the difficulty of passing judgment on the sense-impressions and ascertaining which of them are true and which false. One may be able to say what something appears to be, but cannot make any judgments about what actually is the case. In this sense, the epoché is a realization of existential freedom.

Freedom, then, is a healthy scepticism against every demand made upon personal judgment by the sensate world of appearances. Sceptics considered the hesitation arising as a result of the epoché an enlightened state of being-in-the-world. By abandoning the desire of a self with selfish actions and motivations, paradoxically, one gains everything one thought was given up by abandoning the nurture of the self (i.e. love, money, happiness) in the pursuit of mere-appearances. (In this sense, the epoche is the realization of what modern existentialism would call the "being-in-the-world.") That is why the sceptics considered the epoché to be the proper state from which to judge the relationship between appearances in order to gain peace of mind for daily living. Indeed, the scepticism that comes upon the heels of the epoché, explained Sextus, is not to shrug one's shoulders in indecision regarding competing claims. To understand suspension this way is to see skepticism as a wholly negative position. There is an essentially constructive character of sceptical argument which requires a subtler understanding of suspension. To suspend judgment in this sense is to refuse to assent to a position, while refusing to assert its negation, since either assertion would commit one to a false or misleading metaphysical presupposition. To suspend judgment is to refuse to enter into misguided discourse.

To refuse judgment is also to be free of illness. Sextus regarded scepticism not as a nihilistic attack on our cognitive life, but rather--he used a variety of medical metaphors--a form of philosophical therapy to cure us of the cognitive and emotional ills born of extreme metaphysical, moral, or epistemological positions. The sceptic wishes, from considerations of humanity, to do all he can with the arguments at his disposal to cure the self-conceit and rashness of the dogmatists. And so, just as healers of bodily ailments keep remedies of various potency, and administer the powerful ones to those whose ailments are violent and the lighter ones to those with light complaints, in the same manner the sceptic, too, propounds arguments capable of forcibly removing the condition of dogmatist self-conceit. Quoting Ludwig Wittgenstein: "The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness" (Philosophical Investigations 255). Summed up by Sextus Empiricus:

Those who say that "the Sceptics abolish appearances," or phenomena, seem to me to be unacquainted with the statements of our School. For, as we said above, we do not overthrow the affective sense-impressions which induce our assent involuntarily; and these impressions are "the appearances." And when we question whether the underlying object is such as it appears, we grant the fact that it appears, and our doubt does not concern the appearance itself but the account given of the appearance,---and that is a different thing from questioning the appearance itself. For example, honey appears to us to be sweet (and this we grant, for we perceive sweetness through the senses), but whether it is also sweet in its essence is for us a matter of doubt, since this is not an appearance but a judgment regarding the appearance. And even if we do actually argue against the appearances, we do not propound such arguments with the intention of abolishing appearances, but by way of pointing out the rashness of the Dogmatists; for if reason is such a trickster as to all but snatch away the appearances from under our very eyes, surely we should view it with suspicion in the case of things non-evident so as not to display rashness by following it. (Outlines of Pyrrhoism Bk. 1: "Do the skeptics abolish appearances?")

Summary of Husserl's 1927 Brittannica article - pt 2

II. Phenomenological Psychology and Transcendental Phenomenology
6. Descartes' Transcendental Turn and Locke's Psychologism

Husserl's aim is to discover an a priori method that will finally deliver the certain, scientific objectivity required to realize the Enlightenment dream of a City of Man. This method is phenomenology. Whereas before it had led to a phenomenological psychology (though Husserl did get ahead of himself in the concluding section), Husserl goes on to say that it can also "open the essence of a transcendental phenomenology." The problem is obtaining the transcendental, that is of arriving at a perspective which is not wholly limited by the senses and escaping the cell of solipsism (re: subjective relativism)

The central problem that lies before Husserl is transcendental subjectivity, and this section is largely an archeology of the same. In his epistemological pursuit, Husserl is following the developments of eighteenth century empiricism, and specifically how the transcendental problem was developed by George Berkeley and David Hume from the original insights of John Locke and Renee Descartes. Husserl provides a paragraph on Descartes that is too good not to quote at length. It reads:

"In Descartes' Meditations, the thought that had become the guiding one for "first philosophy" was that all of "reality," and finally the whole world of what exists and is so for us, exists only as the presentational content of our presentations, as means in the best case and as evidently reliable in our own cognitive life. This is the motivation for all transcendental problems, genuine or false. Descartes' method of doubt was the first method of exhibiting "transcendental subjectivity" and his ego cogito led to its first conceptual formulation."

Now John Lock, Husserl goes on to explain, took over Descartes' epistemological problem with alterations. "Descartes' transcendentally pure mens is changed into the "human mind," whose systematic exploration through inner experience Locke tackled out of a transcendental-philosophical interest." Locke, then, founded psychologism, and it is psychologism that must be overcome if Husserl's project is to succeed. But what is psychologism? What is this "transcendental philosophy founded through a psychology of inner experience"?

Psychology at the end of the nineteenth century was the golden child of German epistemology. Psychology suggested a solution to perplexing problems of logic and the theory of knowledge, as well as affording either a substitute or supplement to philosophical idealism. Many felt that in psychology they had found the fundamental discipline which would ground all logical (philosophical) pursuit. Psychology it was felt clarified the subjective elements in all philosophical reasoning and made them certain. As John Stuart Mill wrote, "[Logic] owes all its theoretical foundations to psychology, and includes as much of that science as is necessary to establish the rule of the art."

Such proponents of psychology took their cue from empiricism (thus Husserl's address to John Locke). Knowledge was believed to arrive only through the medium of experience - an absolutely psychological medium. This is what psychologism is: the belief that knowledge arrives only out of subjective experience. Husserl disagreed.

In Prolegomena to First Logic, the first volume of Husserl's Logical Investigation, Husserl rejected any notion of logical rationality (knowledge) that could be explained by individual, contingently subjective processes (psychologism). Psychology could not support the epistemological certainty Husserl desired. Whereas logic detailed "thinking as it should be" (normative laws of thinking), psychology could only offer "thinking as it is" (natural laws of thinking.) Psychology investigates the facticities of consciousness. Logic, on the other hand, is an a priori science which doesn't depend upon any subject, its subject exists atemporally and apart from the need for factual reality. "Because of the scientific and empirical characteristics of psychology, it failed to understand the essence of things and to reach apodictic knowledge. It was only concern with doxa, not episteme. Only logic, which is “a priori”, and whose laws are “atemporal” and not actual, has the means to know the Truth based on reason."[1] Natural laws cannot be a priori, but are only arrived at by experience. Psychological laws arise from the generalization of experience, and thus are subject to probabilities. Not so the laws of logic, which are "established and justified, not by induction, but, by apodictic inner evidence" which gives logical laws an absolute exactness. Thus, psychologism, which weds the philosophical (logical) pursuit of certainty with the method of psychology in a way characteristic of empiricism, confuses logical laws with natural laws, and then claims the former is as probabilistic and relative as the latter. This confusion plays into Husserl's treatment of John Locke.

Husserl claims that the power and attraction of Locke's psychologism arises from the ambiguity that surrounds subjectivity. To raise the transcendental problem is to invoke the ambiguity of the subjective. Locke's psychologism draws its influential staying power from this ambiguity, and that is why it must be eliminated at its root.

Husserl's strategy for overcoming the ambiguity surrounding the subjective - eliminating Locke's psychologism at the root -- is twofold. First, he must treat in parallel phenomenological psychology (the scientifically rigorous form of a psychology based in pure inner experience) and transcendental phenomenology. Second, having dealt with them in parallel, he must completely separate the two from each other. In doing so, he will also justify the previous claim of this article that psychology is the means of access to true philosophy - a claim that apologetically resonates as established truth at the time qua psychologism but which cannot be. Husserl's argument is nuanced here as to sound like the one but actually be another. We proceed with curiosity, and go right into Husserl's doing what every philosopher does at the beginning of an argument: clarifying terms, in this case the transcendental problem.

7. The Transcendental Problem

The transcendental problem "places in question the world and all the sciences investigating it." (One could even go so far as to argue that it is the central problem of philosophy, as it is said that Greek philosophy began with the admission that the senses lie.) The transcendental problem discovers itself (Auftreten) as we begin to question what our sense tell us, or, rather, when we become aware of the foundational role our senses play in relationship we have to the world. It is an astonishing reversal of common experience. We realize that "the 'world' is for us precisely that...world which is present to us." Every sense the world has for us is something generated and formed in a process Husserl calls subjective genesis. What we used to call the world we now call our sense of the world (weltlichen Sinn). "Every acceptance of something as validly existing is effected within ourselves; and every evidence in experience and theory that establishes it, is operative in us ourselves, habitually and continuously motivating us."

Husserl's language invokes David Hume. Where Hume reduced the iron certainty of causation into a subjective mental habit, Husserl finds that in the light of the the transcendental problem "the world in its whole mode of being acquires a dimansion of unintelligibility, or rather of questionableness." Just as with Hume, self-investigation results in a profound loss of confidence. "As human creatures...we ourselves are supposed to belong to the world." "Unintelligibility is felt as a particularly telling affront to our very mode of being [as human beings]."

Of course, Husserl hasn't yet advanced on Locke and psychologism. He has only stated the problem, in its origin and extent, as well as in its effect upon human place-holding. The first trumpet of assault announces itself by the word, How. He writes:

One's first awakening to the relatedness of the world to consciousness gives no understand of how the varied life of consciousness, barely discerned and sinking back into obscurity, accomplishes such functions: how it, so to say, manages in its immanence that something which manifests itself can present itself as something existing in itself, and not only as something meant but as something authenticated in concordant experience.

In other words, his critique is going to focus on how the seeming randomness and subjectivity of meaning-making in a world governed by the transcendental problem actually produces a world which we believe and can share in that belief with others. Further, interrogation must also begin with ourselves and our conscious life-process, because it is there that the "sense [of the everyday world] is first formed" and it is there that "it has gained and can gain its sense and validity."

Husserl goes on from here to discuss possible worlds. This is, at first, an odd step. But given the all-encompassing nature of the transcendental problem it makes perfect sense. If the world is what our senses tell us it is, then our world is one possibility among many. Any world is but the negotiatied product of our senses. Thus, Husserl writes:

If we vary our factual world in free fantasy, carrying it over into random conceivable worlds, we are implicitly varying ourselves whose environment the world is: we each change ourselves into a possible subjectivity, whose environment would always have to be the world that was thought of, as a world of its [the subjectivity's] possible experiences, possible theoretical evidences, possible practical life.

This problem is not dissimilar to Descartes' problem of brains in vats. How do we know that our world is not the world assigned to us? How do we know there are other worlds, or, if there is a correct world, that ours is, in fact, that correct one?

The solution to all this, writes Husserl, rests in those things which are untouched in variation. Invariable essences (Identitäten) which, in his language, "have their existence in eidetic universality" remain untouched by the whirl of possible worlds. They are like higher platonic forms. They relate to each subjective consciousness in a direct intentionality that transcends variation. Thus, they provide a solid place for Husserl's interrogation to stand, and dictate that the method of investigation needed into the transcendental problem is eidetic.

8. The Solution by Psychologism as a Transcendental Circle

Husserl's previous work, outlining the ability of a phenomenologically pure psychology to identify the essential structures of consciousness in a subject, seems ready-made to serve as the vehicle which will overcome the transcendental problem outlined in the previous section. Alas, no. Phenomenological reduction, when applied to the subject, does not truly leave the natural attitude. "Even in eidetic research, the psyche retains the sense of being which belongs in the realm of what is present in the world; it is merely related to possible real worlds." The only way to escape the transcendental problem is to escape the situation which gives rise to it, the spatial world. A natural attitude takes its assumptive definitions for words such as "mind" "I" and other subjects from the presence of a possible spatial world. Instead, the transcendental interest must be decisive. For transcendental philosophy, the subjectivity of consciousness can no longer serve as the beginning point of our interrogations. The regions of the transcendental and the subjective must be clearly defined from each other.

Now the theme of transcendental philosophy is a concrete and systematic elucidation of those multiple intentional relationships which, in conformity with their essences, belong to any possible world whatsoever, where said possible world serves as the one practically and theoretically accessible for any corresponding subjectivity. Again, for any subjectivity that is related to a possible world, transcendental philosophy systematically and concretely details the multiple intentional relationships which would, in conformity to their essences, belong to that world, and any other possible world.

This subjectivity must be assumed as beyond question. This anonymous subjectivity cannot be put into question by the transcendental problem. Otherwise, the question could not be asked, nor the solution sought. Yet this does not mean that a good deal is put into question. Indeed, whatever is associated with or takes its subject from the whole realm of the natural attitude must be subjected to an epoche. This would include, then, psychology. And this is exactly why psychology cannot answer the transcendental question, whether it be empirical psychology or eidetic-phenomenology. But then we have discovered a new insight. We cannot base transcendental philosophy on psychology - to do so would be to create a transcendental circle - and yet the transcendental question occurs to some subjectivity. This subjectivity, then, the subjectivity that asks the transcendental question, must be other than the consciousness with which psychology deals.

9. The Transcendental-Phenomenological Reduction and the Semblance of Transcendental Duplication

more to come....

phenomenology; Edmund Husserl; psychology; John Locke; Renee Descartes; continental philosophy; David Hume; epistemology; George Berkeley; twentieth century.

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Summary of Husserl's 1927 Brittannica article - pt 1

Review of Edmund Husserl's article "Phenomenology" in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1927.

Introduction

The term "phenomenology" can mean one of two things: (1) an epistemological methodology which claims a degree of certainty beyond Descartes' Cogito in the examination of pure experience; (2) philosophical phenomenology, being the a priori "scientific philosophy" derived from this method which "makes possible a methodological reform of all the sciences."

The aim of this article is to explain philosophical phenomenology, but Husserl believes the best way to do this is to begin by explaining phenomenological psychology because it is a pure psychology and "nearer to our natural thinking." Phenomenological psychology developed in parallel with philosphical phenomenology. It sought to provide the best methodological foundation for empirical psychology.

I. Pure Psychology: Its Field of Experience, Its Method, and Its Function
1. Pure Natural Science and Pure Psychology

Psychology is a psychophysical discipline, meaning that it treats the psyche as a part of what human beings and animals are. Thus, it finds its home under the umbrella of anthropology, or, rather, zoology. It understands that what happens in a psyche always occurs within a circle of possibilities and limitations unique to each organism as it participates bodily in its natural environment.

What must first be done, then, when seeking to discover a phenomenological psychology is to ask whether such a thing is even possible. Can one study the immaterial psyche wholly apart from considering its connection to an all-too-material biology? Should one even want to? How far is a pure psychology - as a necessary and legitimate science developing parallel with the physical sciences - possible? These questions must be addressed at the very beginning.

2. The Purely Psychical in Self-experience and Community Experience. The Universal Description of Intentional Experiences

So then, pure psychology will investigate the purely psychical phenomena which are revealed in immediate experience. As we reflect upon our own psychic life, we realize that the things to which we direct our attention appear to us as phenomena, be they real objects, ideas, values, goals, or even figures of our imagination. Phenomena are the subjective experiences a mind contains when it is engaged in conscious activity. These subjective experience are identified through (self)reflection. They are not the things themselves but "appearances-of" or "consciousness-of" those things. The branch of psychology which deals with these phenomena should then be called phenomenological psychology.

Now intentionality is a word which derives from Scholasticism. It describes a basic character of being, which is consciousness of something. In the unreflective holding of some object or other in consciousness, we are turned or directed toward it: our intentio goes out toward it. Therefore, intentionality is fundamentally involved in our every experience.

Turning again to phenomenon. Every phenomenon has its own total form of intention (intentionale Gesamtform). For example, starting from a perception of something, like a die, phenomenological reflection leads to a multiple and yet synthetically unified intentionality. There are continually varying differences in the ways objects appear which are caused by way we change our orientation to and perspective of them, for example right and left, nearness or farness. There are further differences in appearance between the "actually seen front" and the "unseeable" (unanschaulichen) and relatively undetermined reverse side which nevertheless goes along with that object. Observing the flux and modes of appearing and the manner of their synthesis, one discovers that every phase and portion of this flux is certainly a consciousness-of, but in such a way that each observation is put together into a synthetically unified awareness of one and the same object. This is that object's intentional structure. The intentional structure of any process of perception has its fixed essential type (seine feste Wesentypik) which must necessarily be realized in all its extraordinary complexity just in order for a physical body simply to be perceived as such. This kind of analysis can be applied to any phenomena. Our everyday perception is a river awash in changing sensation. Objects constitute themselves to us in fixed essential forms in a flowing intentionality.

The task of pure psychology is, then, to investigate systematically the elementary intentionalities, and from out of these [unfold] the typical forms of intentional processes, their possible variants, their syntheses to new forms, their structural composition, and from this advance toward a descriptive knowledge of the totality of mental process, toward a comprehensive type of a life of the psyche.

Further, psychic life doesn't just occur in our own heads, but in the heads of others. Each person has something to bring to the table, establishing differences between as well a properties in common within the psychic life of a community. We can then posit the task of making phenomenologically understandable the mental life of a community, with all the intentionalities that pertain to it, thus approaching a universal typology of psychological experience (Gesamttyplts eines Lebens der Seele).

3. The Self-contained Field of the Purely Psychical: Phenomenological Reduction and True Inner Experience

Coming after the rapturious vision of his last section, Husserl admits that the creation of a phenomenological psychology completely free of psychophysical data may be impossible. Difficulties lie in the way which frustrate his efforts and force him to carefully consider his fundamental methodology. The method he comes up with is called "phenomenological reduction." It is a method appropriate to the type of being to be interrogated (human beings). Indeed, phenomenological reduction is the foundational method of pure psychology by which the absoluteness of the intentional world is reduced to that which exists only in consciousness.

The greatest inhibitor of the construction of a pure psychology is the ever-assertive self-experience of the psychologist. Everytime one's awareness is directed toward something out there in the world one must completely resist the temptation to assume the knowing of the already there. The phenomenologist, says Husserl, must elide (epoch) herself if she is ever to break through to her own consciousness as a pure phenomenon, which is the totality of her own purely mental processes. No objective judgments can interfere. Every specific experience of something - of this house, of this body, of this world - must be separated into an absolute judgment of things and the impressions in consciousness made by the things themselves. The former must be elided (epoche), and the latter "put in brackets."

That which is put in brackets is the world as it is given in consciousness (Bewusstseinssinn). For an example of this, think of the impressionists who desired not to paint the habitually recognized world of things, such as a table, fruit or clouds, but only the light coming from those things. Only the meaning which each thing makes in consciousness is allowed to make up the phenomenological field.

Thus, Husserl arrived at his method for obtaining pure phenomenon: phenomenological reduction. This method, he says, is the basis of any well-grounded science of psychology. It is a method constantly moving toward the pure phenomenon (the purely psychical.) It consists of (1) the methodological epoche of the absolute objective part of each experience, followed by (2) the careful and scientific description of things as they appear in consciousness. Such description makes a twofold judgment between the noetic and the noematic.

The former (noesis) is the "real object." Going back to the example of the impressionists, the noesis is that judgment which says "that is a tree," or "that is a building." The latter, the noematic, is the experience of the patterns of color, light and shadow. The noema is achieved as the "real", noetic world is put aside. By nature, it is something achieved after-the-fact, in a backward glance, a retroactive effort. One desires to become aware of the experience of seeing apart from the nearly immediate judgment of what is seen. Every perception, every intentionality (for, where Husserl is concerned, perception is intentional, even if understood as passive intention. Perception is the intention to receive) must be parsed into its component parts. This is the method of phenomenological reduction. This is the method of "bracketing." Bracketing frees us from errors of prejudgment, disentangling the "intentional object" (noema) from the "realm object" (noesis) so that we obtain scientific knowledge of the object’s activation of our sensorium. As Husserl says, "we must abide by what is given in pure experience." Michael Sicinski of U. C. Berkeley describes this method as such:

Husserl’s phenomenology is able to separate the experience of sense data from the conceptual recognition of objects, particularly as those objects fill out our preexisting categories of understanding. By distinguishing between these two analytical moments, it becomes possible to see shape, form, and motion as discrete entities in themselves. This in turn becomes a single moment in a dialectical tension, as "content" (understood broadly as any meaning not fully immanent to the sensual presence of an artwork) inevitably impresses itself upon consciousness. In actual experience, neither of these categories exists separately, nor does either of them arrive before the other. And so, in order to consider one and not the other, a significant degree of effort (that is, intention) is necessary on the part of the viewer.

Phenomenological reduction is the template for the new, pure psychology, which should begin in earnest and be carried out in infinitum. Further, it should be applied not only to self-experience, but also to the experience of others, insofar as there can be applied to the envisaged (vergegen-wärtigten) mental life of the Other the corresponding bracketing and description. The psychologist constantly asks "how" things appear, and parses out in each appearance what corresponds to noesis and noema. In this way, community experence is not broken up into mentally particularized intentional fields, but assumes a connected mental community life in its phenomenological purity. [When applied to a larger community, Husserl's method of phenomenological reduction is called intersubjective reduction.]

Indeed, to every mind there belongs not only the unity of its multiple intentional life-process (intentionalen Lebens) with all its inseparable unities of sense directed toward the "object." There is also, inseparable from this life-process, the experiencing subject, the I, which is the gravitational centre of all all specific intentionalities, and point of origin for all habitualities growing out of this life-process. Likewise, then, the reduced intersubjectivity, in pure form and concretely grasped, is a community of pure "persons" acting in the intersubjective realm of the pure life of consciousness.

4. Eidetic Reduction and Phenomenological Psychology as an Eidetic Science

What is phenomenological reduction really after? Simply this: the eidos. Every potential form of mental being, every synthetic combination and self-contained wholes, has within it a same-thing. It must have an essential part, otherwise how could any of these things even be thinkable? This necessary thing held in common across all perceptions and relations, this invariant in variation, is the eidos, the essential form without which perception of an object or act is impossible. The method which gets at these eidoi underneath all perceptions, the method which perceives their essential structures, is eidetic reduction, or reduction to the eidos. Therefore, because eidetic reduction gets at the very essence of perception, it is an a priori science and grants assurance that phenomenological psychology, as a field of pure psychology resting upon phenomenological experience, is possible.

5. The Fundamental Function of Pure Phenomenological Psychology for an Exact Empirical Psychology

In this summary section of part 1, Husserl proclaims his radical allegiance to the Enlightenment project, namely the discovery of a certainty so foundational and absolute that from it may be constructed the foundation for a new and glorious City of Man developing on the foundation of epistemological certainty promised by the Cartesian method of doubt (read: reason and the scientific method). He, thus, proposes an "exact" (certain) empirical (mathematical/geometrical) psychology as in inner science operating in parallel to the outer, physical sciences.

Psychology, like every science, can only draw its "exactness" from the rationality of the essence.

The exactness of this pure psychology derives from its foundation in the a priori essential forms of experience. Psychology, he says, like every other science, can only draw its rigour and exactness from the objective study of that which is essential. Taken together with systems deduced from the study of other essential forms as they are distributed throughout the natural sciences, the result is an inductive, empirical Science which has all the force of a priori eidetic necessity! As an example of such a "joining of the sciences at the meeting of their forms" to form a pure and exact Science, Husserl demonstrates that the a priori set of types discovered through eidetic reduction produces a field of exactness which can be brought to bear on research of the psyche. At that point, it should by synthesized with a priori "sets" of results from other investigations, so that pure psychology, psychophysical psychology and those of physical scienceis combine to form an a priori, empirical psychology. The steps of such a method are as such:

(1) There must be a careful description of intentional mental processes
(2) These descriptions should be assembled into a typology of their essences: both those that are discrete and those that are continuous with others, the finitely closed and those continuing into open infinity
(3) The eidetic description (Wesendeskription) of the total structure (Gesamtgestalt) of "stream of consciousness" mental life
(4) Further investigation into the "I" as subject of lasting beliefs or thought tendencies, personal habits, trained knowing and certain character qualities

The above "static" description of essences must further be pursued as to their dynamic origins. Just as David Hume traced causality to the customary, the "I" must be traced back to what develops it. An account should be given, then, of the a priori genesis out of which a real spatial world constitutes itself for the mind in habitual acceptance. Then, afterward, the development of personal habituality and consciousness-of-self in habitual coming to being and as always being transformed. There is, thus, the static and then, on a higher level, the genetic phenomenology of reason, these developing according to eidetic laws (eidetischen Gesetzen).

Husserl does not stop here, though. One would think this vision alone would be enough to end part 1, but, no, he cannot avoid the verbal nature of reality. "The static description of essences," he writes, "leads to problems." It cannot explain the nature of reality, which is heraclitic and always moving (Husserl calls this movement genesis). Therefore, he sees further development in his programme.

From a static phenomenology, comes a dynamic or genetic phenomenology at a higher level. This all-embracing eidetic phenomenology of association, which investigates passively the way that a spatial world passively and habitually constitutes itself to the mind. From there, Husserl believes a personal step should be taken and attention be given to the way an personal "I" develops, becoming concious of itself as a continuing and constantly transforming subject. Finally, upon that platform, Husserl envisages two more: first a static and then a dynamic (genetic) phenomenology of reason. In short, beginning with a pure psychology, Husserl proposes a new, yet better foundation that will ultimately clarify and envigorate that crowning tool of the Enlightenment: reason.

phenomenology; Edmund Husserl; psychology.

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