This post is meant to be an abbreviated introduction to Husserl’s idea of phenomenology and some of it’s parts. If someone is interested specifically in the history of phenomenology, I recommend they check out the introduction to the subject written by Dermot Moran. We will be sticking largely to the actual theory with a minimum of historical introduction. For this post, we’ll be looking at Husserl’s style of phenomenology, which is the original. In a few weeks we’ll start looking at the opinions and positions of Heidegger, and the ways he modifies the subject.
The natural standpoint
This is the position everyone begins with when they start philosophy. It believes in the World, which is the “totality of objects that can be known through experience, known in terms of orderly theoretical thought on the basis of direct present experience.” (ideas pg 54). This is the location of all our science, such as physics, psychology, and economics. All sciences which go beyond the (soon to be described) phenomenological viewpoint are encased in the natural standpoint. The belief that you sleep in a bed, or sit in actual chairs, or have a family, are all part of the natural standpoint. It is also a place of meaning: “Without further effort on my part I find the things before me furnished not only with qualities that befit their positive nature, but those value-characters such as beautiful or ugly, agreeable or disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant, and so forth.”
The world of the natural standpoint gives us the content that we will be utilizing in philosophy. The perceptions of things in the world, their space, our understanding of them in time, the viewing of things as valuable, as pleasurable or beautiful, will all supply us with different subjects to be investigated in philosophy.
The epoche, or phenomenological reduction
The epoche is a suspension of belief one way or the other about the world. You take all of the facts about the world like “I have a chair” or “the lasagna is burnt”, and you suspend judgment. It's important to distinguish this from disbelief, there is no positive belief in the idea that the world isn’t there. The factuality (this is different from Heidegger’s idea of facticity that we’ll probably get to eventually) of the world as a whole is put out of play, in any significant sense for Husserl’s project in phenomenology.
After the epoche, all that’s left in the world is the imminent experience of things. Take the example of the chair. When you see a chair, you have two things: your experience of the chair, and the chair's factuality, its existence. After the epoche is applied though, you lose the factuality of the chair, and are left with nothing but your experience of the chair.
As a side note, the term ‘epoche’ comes from a Greek school of skepticism, made particularly famous by a dude named Sextus Empiricus. Though, they wouldn’t just suspend judgment of propositions, they would do special work on arguing for and against every proposition. For any argument that seemed to support something, they would try to construct an argument for the opposite proposition. This worked itself out in a funny way occasionally. For example, Sextus had a series of complicated arguments against the existence of time (that can be found in chapter 1 of “The Philosophy of Time, a Contemporary Introduction”). Against his series of complicated arguments he simply says that we kind of just experience time constantly and that it’s nuts to deny it. So on the one side you have his superduper arguments, and on the other side you just have the whole ‘living in time’ thing.
The ego
The self, or the I definitely isn’t something found in experience. You don’t see the self of experience with your vision, or hear him with your ears. Despite all this, we still have an understanding of a self which accompanies our stream of experiences. There is some collection of experiences that a particular individual self has, and they are always identified as experiences of the same stream. “In contrast, the pure Ego appears to be necessary in principle, and as that which remains absolutely self-identical in all real and possible changes of experience, it can in no sense be reckoned as a real part or phase of the experiences themselves” (Ideas, pg.172, italics in the original text).
Questions about the exact nature of the self reach an incredible pitch of complexity in conversations between Hume, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and eventually Zahavi. I’ll touch on these occasionally, but many of these debates are out of my immediate reach. The second and third posts however will be about an objection to Husserlian phenomenology and a kind of self awareness of our acts of perception.
Intentionality
Intentionality for Husserl is any kind of object directed thought. You have perceptions, and judgements, and memories, and expectations about objects. For Husserl, intentionality has three aspects: act, object, and content. The object is the thing known, say a friend. The act is the kind of intention which is directed to the object, like memory. The intentional content is the qua presentation of the object, you can think of it as the “as” presentation of the object. I can have a perceptual experience of my friend. The way by which I perceive him is the content. I could perceive a friend by looking at the side of his face, or looking at his face head on. There are different profiles by which I perceive my friend. The object stays the same, it’s always the same friend. There are just different modes of presentation.