Edmund Husserl by Dermot Moran

Author:Dermot Moran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

5

The Eidetic Phenomenology of Consciousness

At this point in our narrative, it might be expected that we would proceed to discuss Husserl’s next major publication, Ideen I (1913), and thence to his later works, e.g. FTL (1929), CM (1931) and Krisis (1936). But this is not what I propose to do. I shall now depart from the linear explication of Husserl’s development in order to pursue a more systematic overview of his eidetic phenomenology. There are several reasons for this. First, while Ideen I is Husserl’s most comprehensive exposition of his phenomenology as a method, it is also hastily written, poorly structured and, in places, quite sketchy. Moreover, in his mature work, Husserl was attempting a systematic exposition of phenomenology from several different points of view, and there is no canonical text offering a complete overview. Rather than concentrate on one text, therefore, I shall attempt a more synthetic account of Husserl’s eidetic and transcendental phenomenology, ranging across texts from his later Göttingen and Freiburg years.

A major preoccupation of Husserl’s was to develop an eidetic account of ‘the wonderful constitution of consciousness’ (23: 458), a ‘science of pure consciousness’ (10: 335), a project that involved the ‘uncovering’ (Enthüllung), ‘illuminating’ (Erhellung, Aufhellung) and ‘clarifying’ (Aufklärung, Klarlegung) of its essential ‘forms’ (Gestalten).1 His interest in the ‘multiplicities of manners of appearing and their intentional structures’ (6: 175) began with the description of conscious experiences in LU V;2 but, especially in his notes and lectures, he continued to pursue detailed characterizations of the essences of conscious states and acts – perception, memory, fantasy, the awareness of time, judgement3 – throughout his career. These intentional descriptions form the backdrop to his later researches into the ego, the ‘life-world’, and the experience of worldhood as such. Here I shall focus on Husserl’s account of individual conscious life, excluding the dimension of intersubjectivity, which will be discussed in chapter 7 below.

As we have seen, after 1905 Husserl believed that these eidetic structures only came properly into view following the epoché and the phenomenological and transcendental reductions. In fact, however, the main features of his account of a priori pure consciousness did not change fundamentally through his career, although the account became increasingly elaborate and was inserted into new thematic contexts (e.g. the broader horizons of the natural life-world). While he believed that genuine phenomenology requires the epoché (understood in an increasingly enlarged sense) and the suspension of the natural attitude, he recognized that eidetic truths continue to hold (albeit in modified fashion) and are translatable ‘sentence by sentence’ in the new transcendental science of pure consciousness (see 34: 3–4). In other words, the account offered in this chapter of ‘consciousness in its pure essentiality’ is not one that will be reversed or contradicted by transcendental phenomenology. What distinguishes the transcendental from the eidetic approach is precisely that the eidetic still operates with ‘belief in the world’ (Weltglaube) and has not made the constitution of the world itself a problem, so is not yet a philosophy of ‘ultimate foundations’ which explicates just how the phenomenon of world is constituted.

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