The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology by Saulius Geniusas

Author:Saulius Geniusas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

Thus the principle of apodicticity cannot be seen as a presupposition underlying the universality of transcendental subjectivity; apodicticity at best can be conceived as an Idea, which remains to be established after disclosing the horizons of subjectivity.

Just as our experience of the past, so our experience of the future also calls for a double reduction. And even if the future does not present itself as strictly analogous to the experience of the past—after all, what I anticipate is not given as determinately as what I remember—nonetheless, the general structure of the reduction that pertains to anticipation and to remembrance is largely the same. Here also we face a “double transcendental”—on the one hand, expectation as a present experience, and on the other hand, the entailed content of expectation. And just as the experience of the past opened up its chains through which it revealed itself as endlessly continuous, so expectation also entails such chains, which lead me to my endless future.

Yet what exactly does it mean to suggest that the content of each and every remembrance, as well as of anticipation, is a “piece of a chain” which entails within itself references to other lived-experiences? The metaphor of a chain—and let us for the moment suspend the question of its appropriateness—indicates that each experience of the past and of the future is given within a horizonal framework which itself is nothing other than my transcendental life. As Husserl has it, “provided that every presence always carries with it a future horizon of expectation, we have again, analogously to the endless horizon of the transcendental past, an open endless horizon of transcendental future” (Hua VIII, 86).13 These horizons reveal themselves as horizons, which belong exclusively to subjectivity, primarily because the “chains,” in which each and every experience manifests itself, make their appearance in the wake of the suspension of objective time.14 It is the uncovering of these “chains” that brings forth, as the title of §39 of First Philosophy II suggests, the full content of universal self-experience, which is nothing other than the content of the full subjectivity of which I spoke in Sect. 6.5.

Let us call the following characterization of the horizon its first determination that First Philosophy II brings forth: the horizons of subjectivity reveal themselves as the “mirroring,” or the implication of the whole life of consciousness within each lived-experience. It is hard not to see this realization as Husserl’s secular alternative to William James’ remark in his Principles: if the divine mind could glance into any of our experiences, he would see within each of them the whole life of subjectivity. Although the horizons subjectivity inhabits are manifold, each of them ultimately merges with all others, thereby necessitating one to speak of the horizon of subjectivity in the singular. At this stage we are not yet ready to ask how the horizonal framework of subjectivity limits the range of possibilities that pertain to experience, even though this question already lurks in the background. We are still in need of gaining a better understanding of the structure of horizonal references.

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