The Sources of Husserl’s 'Ideas I' by Andrea Staiti Evan Clarke

Author:Andrea Staiti,Evan Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2018-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

III

Let us now turn to the second section of Ideas. It contains two important claims: (1) by bracketing the “natural thesis” we obtain a domain of pure consciousness, which can be investigated on its own terms; (2) the data of this pure consciousness are always self-given, that is, they do not possess the phenomenal character of external experience; consequently, this entire sphere is absolute, while everything real is merely relative. The correctness of the first claim is easy to prove, as the rest of the book provides sufficient evidence for it by actually carrying out the research. The second claim, however, seems highly dubious, bound up in old philosophical errors.

The absoluteness of self-consciousness in Descartes is famously the point of departure for all modern theory of knowledge, and Husserl himself is well aware of this connection. All subsequent philosophers, including Leibniz and the British empiricists, were influenced by it. Kant worked very hard to free himself from Descartes’ thesis, without fully succeeding (Kant 1998, B 422, fn.); the thesis is restored to its former standing by his successors, notably Schelling and Schopenhauer. In explanatory psychology, the need to study the actuality of lived experience, not as an ultimate datum, but as the appearance of psychical reality, created a counterbalance. The Neo-Kantians had a similar effect, only, in the place of psychical reality, they introduced a more or less unknowable X. One sees that we are dealing here with an entirely central issue; the founding principle of the absoluteness of consciousness is the cornerstone of all subjective idealism and phenomenalism [Konzientialismus], from Descartes to Mach. Naturally, Husserl is not working towards a phenomenalism in the usual sense; he emphatically stresses that the transcendent “reality” of things should remain untouched. Rather, his analysis pertains only to the supposedly legitimate core of Cartesian and all later idealism, which he locates in the proposition according to which “the world of transcendent ‘res’ is utterly dependent upon […] currently actual consciousness.” (Ideen 92/89, see also 93/90) Precisely this is the authentic, fundamental position of idealism [404] which Kant struggled against. (Kant 1998, B 274f.) One may want to object to Kant’s proof by saying that what is at issue here is not a science of real consciousness that is woven into the world, but a science of phenomenologically reduced consciousness. One should remember, however, that there is only one consciousness and that it is either absolute or bound up with the world. If justification requires not only freedom from contradictions, but also agreement with a state of affairs, then it is entirely impossible to acknowledge both the realist and the idealist positions as justified from their respective standpoints. Both want to determine the “true” relationship of consciousness and reality. Even if one can conceptually disentangle pure lived experience from all connections with the real world, the question remains whether the objects that correspond to this concept, namely, the actual streams of experience of living people, exhibit the same isolation and autonomy in their being. The

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