Husserl's Reduction and Adumbrations
Husserl's Reduction and Adumbrations
Husserl's Reduction and Adumbrations
Joel C. Sagut
Introduction
The topic of this exposition is no longer new to this class since quite a
number of our classmates have already reported on this. Nevertheless, I have
committed to understand this topic since we started with our course, and so, I
would like to share my own understanding of the issue at hand. Let it be
mentioned from the very start that this exposition does not intend to simplify
the thought of our philosopher for such would be a too ambitious goal.
Rather, let this report be an opportunity for me to submit myself to your
assessment as to whether I have understood even a fragment of what
Husserl intends to say. For the possible misreading and shortcomings, I ask
your understanding and consideration.
1
David Bell, Husserl. (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1990), 153.
2
Logical Investigation, vol. 1, 225.
3
Objectivity here is meant to refer to the being’s existence outside consciousness.
4
Cf. Roman Ingarden, On the Motives which led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, trans. Arnor
Hannibalsson. (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 5.
5
Bell, 154.
1
The interest of this present reflection is however not to validate or refute this
claim for an original realist standpoint in Husserl. Our mention here of this
particular transcendental turn shall merely be taken as the starting point for
our investigation of the transcendental idealism of Husserl. We start with a
mention of the naturalistic standpoint to offer a comparative description of
naturalism and phenomenology. Hence, our timidity to go into further
investigation about the truthfulness of the claim on Husserl’s naturalism may,
I hope, not be taken to be in itself a violation of the phenomenological
method.
What could have been the reason for Husserl’s shift from naturalism to
transcendental idealism? Commentators have noted that the shift coincides
with Husserl’s changed appreciation of the being of the real world. 6
Naturalism “is committed to the view that the universe contains nothing but
natural phenomena – a natural phenomenon being any object, event,
property, fact, or the like.”7 In other words, naturalism limits the scope of
investigation with the tangible, verifiable things and their properties. Hence,
we have the natural sciences.
Transcendental idealism, on the other hand, is the view that “the mind is not
ultimately just a part of the natural world, but on the contrary must be
assigned some foundational or constitutive role with respect to the natural
world…”8 Husserl later believed that for philosophy to be truthful to its goal, it
must go beyond the naturalism of the sciences.9 Husserl later realized that in
the process of cognition, the role of the mind is undeniably important. The
mind is also constitutive of reality10 and hence, subjectivity should never be
ignored in the process of cognition.
6
Cf. Ingarden, 5.
7
Bell, 154. In naturalism, the object exists independent of the mind. This means then that one
object, insofar as it exists, will be perceived uniformly by the perceiving minds. Hence, natural sciences’
reliance on the law of probability. A disease for example is treated in almost the same way because of the
assumption that all diseases, as long as they belong to the same category, can be treated in the same way.
8
Bell, 155.
9
Quine’s comment crystallizes this Husserlian perspective: “naturalism is the abandonment of the
goal of a first philosophy.” (quoted in Bell, 155). This will have some traces in the philosophical project of
Husserl’s student, Martin Heidegger, who endeavors to question the onto-theological character of the entire
Western Metaphysics. Heidegger also claimed that the entire philosophical endeavor of the West is not
really philosophical but an onto-theology. Husserl highly influenced Heidegger to become vigilant on the
life-world rather than on the more speculative endeavor of expounding the “naturalized terms” in the entire
system of western metaphysics. As one author writes, “Each of these German thinkers (Heidegger very
early in his career and Husserl in the last phases of his reflections) is convinced that a survey of the Life-
world is more pertinent than a grand systematic vision. This was and remains a direct challenge to the
traditional canons of truth derived from substance-metaphysics, the main line of Western philosophy.” Cf.
Richard Owsley, “Truth in the Thinking of Heidegger and Husserl,”
http://www.unt.edu/csph/Vol_01_winter00/owsley_art.htm, retrieved last October 01, 2007.
10
This illustrates the Kantian influence in Husserl. Cf. Marvin Farber, “Edmund Husserl and the
Aims of Phenomenology,” http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/farber6.html, retrieved last October 01,
2007.
2
The shift to transcendental idealism is then a necessary consequence of
Husserl’s aim to name the relation between the mind (consciousness) and the
thing of naturalism. He wishes to reconcile “the subjectivity of knowing and
the objectivity of the content known.”11
He also believed that the natural sciences and the human sciences are so
characterized because of their well-defined domain or field. They are called a
science because they have an item of which they are responsible to explore.
This allows the sciences to have a doctrinal content, which is stable over
time, accepted unquestioningly by the majority of the scientists working
within this discipline, and it is objective, meaning there is no room for private
opinion, notions and points of view.14 This makes these sciences naïve, not
rigorous. A naïve science simply investigates that which is there, as given.
“These natural and human sciences, in other words, are philosophically naïve.
They have an unquestioned commitment to the adequacy of naturalistic
standpoint.”15
But, Husserl also argues that any science, not just philosophy, can become a
rigorous science. Even natural sciences can become rigorous sciences as long
as it ceases to be a naïve science (dogmatic science). If this is the case, what
distinguishes philosophy from other sciences then is the particular species of
which philosophy is tasked to investigate or describe. So, the question now is:
what is this specific species that is unique of philosophy? We mention here of
transcendental subjectivity.
11
Bell, 157.
12
Cf. Bell, 157.
13
Bell, 157.
14
Bell, 158.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid, 159.
3
When Husserl speaks then of a rigorous science, he was interested not with
the science that would claim for an ultimate “foundation of certainty” but he
simply wishes to understand the process on how shall we arrive at this
certainty. It is not as if he asks, what are the foundations of certain truths?
But rather he asks, how should we arrive at certitude?17
4
The most significant characteristic of the natural attitude is its philosophical
naivety, a naivety which it therefore transmits to the natural and human
sciences, a naivety which simply consists in the uncritical and largely
unconscious adoption of all these philosophically problematic commitments.
What could this mean? This simply suggests that we cannot totally eradicate
our biases because it’s part of the structure of our consciousness. We are
historical and temporal beings, and we are always situated in a given time
and space, and our being-thrown-into-the-world (if we may use the term)
affords us already of some natural attitudes that we could hardly escape. But
for our knowledge to become objective, there is a need for us to bracket, to
put aside, our natural attitude, that is, the prejudices and biases to which our
natural attitude is committed. We refuse to let it affect our present cognition
over the thing perceived.
In a sentence, “an old man is wise” there are two things to consider (1) the
assertion that “old men are wise”, which can be used as a premise of a
deduction; and (2) the description that “old men are thought to be wise.”
There is a meaningful difference between the two. The first one is assertive,
while the second one is simply descriptive. It can be observed that in the
second, there is a cancellation of the positing act quality. The second
statement suspends judgment whereas the first one asserts it. To bracket is
simply to avoid the tendency to avoid to assert. It simply means the
overcoming of either positive (affirmation) or negative (negation) assertion.
21
Ideas ¶31, p.107)
22
Ideas, ¶ 32, p.111.
5
Husserl clarifies further that the content can never be overcome, although
the assertion can be bracketed. Husserl himself says, “when I perform the
reduction, although I refrain from passing judgment into the world, I do not
thereby deny this world, as though I were a skeptic. Rather, I perform the
phenomenological epoche, [and this merely] bars me from using any
judgment that concerns spatio-temporal existence.”23 It is also to be noted
that the bracketing referred to here is not even to be construed as “doubting,
suspecting, supposing, assuming.” One simply becomes indifferent to the
assertion.
But the question that we are to face now is: after the reduction, what remains
to be the object of our consciousness? Husserl is also aware that “it is
necessary now to make transparent the fact that we are not left with just a
meaningless, habitual abstention.”24 Hence, Husserl says that after the
phenomenological reduction, there remains the PHENOMENOLOGICAL
RESIDUUM. This is the specific species of the consciousness.
This is what Husserl would call as the paradox. On the one hand, the
phenomenological reduction instructs us to bracket our commitments. But,
after the reduction, we are presented with the “pure transcendental
consciousness (which) is left over as a residuum.”25 This residuum is that
which the phenomenological reduction cannot really bracket. Hence, we
bracket everything, and yet we know that there is a residuum that we cannot
completely get rid of. He calls this a paradox.
23
Ideas, ¶ 32, p.111.
24
Ideas, 41, p. 151.
25
Ideas, ¶ 55, p.170.
26
Bell, 168. The residuum is not to be equated with the universals (the intentional forms or ideas).
The residuum are still sensory data but they are freed from biases and prejudices (commitments) of our
natural attitude,
6
so we have the residuum to account for the ‘something’ in our appreciation of
consciousness as always a consciousness of something.
But after the reduction, what happens now in the consciousness? To this
Husserl says that the residuum that remains after the reduction has twofold
bed: (1) the material bed which he calls as the hyletic data, and the (2) noetic
bed which he calls as the intentional functioning.
Earlier we speak about the content and the assertion, and we said that the
reduction takes away the assertoric character of the content forms. But the
content remains even after the reduction. This, I believe, is what Husserl calls
as the hyletic data. The hyletic data are comprised of “sensantions, feelings,
sense data, non-intentional sensory stuffs.”27 They are given to
consciousness.
The noesis
IDEOGENESIS
Sense impression 1 (color)
S
E
OBJECT
Sense impression 2 (shape)
N
Common
S
HUSSERL’S CONSCIOUNESS
Hyletic data 1
Hyletic data 2
Noetic process
OBJECT
noema
Hyletic data 3 Synthetic activity of the mind
Passive synthesis
27
Bell, p. 172.
28
Ibid.
7
Active synthesis
The analogy that I intend to bring here is not between ideogenesis and
transcendental reduction, but rather, between the former and Husserl’s
structure of the consciousness. For it seems to me at the outset that there is
a semblance between Husserl’s structure of the consciousness (with the use
of the terms hyletic data, noesis and noema) to the Aristotelian theory of
cognition. Husserl argued that the hyletic data are received passively by the
consciousness (and so are the sense impressions of the object received by
the senses). Then the hyletic data are acted upon by the synthetic activity of
the noesis (in the same way as the common sense unites the sense
impressions to make it a meaningful whole). Then lastly, the “sense” created
by the synthetic activity is called as the “noema” (in the same way, the
phantasm is born as a product of the unifying act of the common sense.
Trying to get a sense of what I have understood about Husserl, I’d like to note
that Husserl was primarily interested in arriving at apodictic truth. But in the
process, he finds out that there are several hindrances. First, he realizes that
the world is not as simple as the early realists would suppose. The world is
8
not as “objectively” existing as Aristotle presupposed it to be. Hence,
apodictic knowledge is not a mere scavenging of what is objectively out
there.
Husserl’s problem is not even the concern of Descartes: that the body and
the senses may fool us in our search for knowledge. For Husserl, the crux of
the problem surfaced with the coming of Kant. When Kant had reflected
about the constitutive character of the mind, there arise the real problem of
apodicticity. Subjectivity is undeniable, and if the mind constitutes reality,
then there can be as many reality, there can be as many meanings, as there
are so much minds. With this, can we now simply abandon our search for an
apodictic and objective truth?
Since the mind is naturally embedded with prejudices and biases, there is a
need for a reduction that would set these biases and prejudices aside. In so
far as we want to arrive at the truth, we try our best to remove the personal
baggage that we tag along with us in our search. But the question now is:
how much of reduction can we really do? How much of ourselves can we
really get rid of?
Even after the reduction, Husserl continues to admit that the mind could not
fully get rid of itself. The residuum remains and the noetic process remains to
be constitutive of the reality of the perceived. This is clearly stated in
Ingarden’s commentary on Husserl: “Thus the fundamental thesis of
transcendental idealism is obtained: what is real is nothing but a constituted
noematic unity (individual) of a special kind of sense which in its being and
quality results from a set of experiences of a special kind and is quite
impossible without them… The existence of what is perceived is nothing “in
itself” but only something “for somebody,” or for the experiencing ego.”29
Adumbrations
Before ending this reflection, there is one thing which I believe is helpful for
our quest for objectivity and apodicticity. This is Husserl’s concept of the
adumbrations. Simply put, the adumbrations refer to the various partial,
perspectival aspects under which a given object can be presented.30 Husserl
simply warns us against the tendency to think “that what I am actually
presented with, the literal content of my experience, is something more or
less static, inert, and self-contained. It is, we might say, something that could
in essence be captured in a photograph, something of which we could
conceivably make a self-contained picture or copy.”31
But the truth about our perception is, it is only always partial, perspectival. It
does not give us the whole truth at one time. Husserl explains, “every
intentional object is surrounded by ‘an empty horizon of possibilities’ which,
29
Ingarden, p.21.
30
Bell, 189.
31
Ibid.
9
despite being only ‘dimly apprehended’ are nevertheless present in the
experience of that object and contribute to determine its nature.”32
There is indeed a possibility for an objective and apodictic truth. But this
should not be taken to mean the metaphysical, trans-historical, trans-
temporal truths. We can in fact agree without debate that certain things are
as such. Would we still be arguing about the apodicticity of an apple fruit if
we are eating that same apple in a common meal? But despite its seemingly
obvious truthfulness, we are reminded that our cognition remains to be mere
adumbrations, hence we need to be aware of more possibilities in our quest
for knowing.
32
Ideas, ¶ 27, p.103.
10