Tutorial on Husserl

[kdp]

TUTORIAL: Here I am going to begin a tutorial concerning my views
about Husserl in which I try to summarize what I learned from Welton
about Husserl which I think is new and an important direction in the
study of Husserl.

What must be understood about Husserl is that he is essentially trying
to solve fundamental issues in Kantian Philosophy and he accepts the
Transcendental Framework of Kant. All the problems that he runs into
like solipsism, intersubjectivity, etc are tied to that acceptance of
the Transcendental Framework of Kant. What Husserl says is that if we
cannot know the noumena then the thing to do is to study everything
immanent, i.e. only within consciousness and he develops the method of
bracketing to provide the buffer so that he will not be discussing the
transcendental framework itself. Husserl thought he could solve the
problems of Kant's critical philosophy, which had been eclipsed by
Hegelianism, within the realm of consciousness. Also it is important
to realize that he was working prior to the arising of Gestalt ideas,
and so this is a major problem that was addressed by his student
Gurwitsch.

In Husserl the primary distinction is between Intentional Morphe and
Hyle in the study of the bracketed consciousness, i.e. in
consciousness that does not look beyond itself into the framework. Of
course, this framework is still implied even by this most fundamental
distinction. But for Husserl this distinction is merely a sraw man
because he realizes that Intentional Morphe (consciousness of
something as meaninful) is always mixed with content, i.e. some
percept of the hyle. Therefore he immediately converts this strawman
distinction into the distinction between noesis and nomea. Noesis is
mostly meaning with some content. Noema is mostly content with some
meaning. They form a spectrum. And that spectrum spans the entirety of
consciousness and everything in it. For Husserl all consciousness is
consciousness of something which has meaning and content combined.
Husserl does not consider awareness, i.e. non-directed "consciousness"
in general. Gurewitsch adds this in which considerations of the
fringes and margins of consciousness. But myself I would like to
consider awareness as separate from consciousness.

Also Husserl is prior to the real consideration of the unconscious as
a factor as we seen in Freud and Jung. Of course the unconscious would
fall under bracketing as it is a kind of noumena (Wille). But still we
must keep this in mind because understanding the unconscious has
become an obsession since the time of Husserl and he really does not
have much to say about that.

We have to keep in mind what Husserl was trying to do, which was
basically trying to understand what number is or how logic works
within the context of consciousness. Since no one knew was number was
or how logic worked when thought of without this context he thought
that perhaps the structures of consciousness itself might shed some
light on the problem. For instance he wanted to know what judgement
is. In other words he wanted to know how the underpinnings of science
worked in the human mind. But in order to get there he started with
consciousness, rather than merely creating a dogmatic or critical
philosophy that was entirely conceptual. This was a first in
philosophy because it meant that everyone could check their own
experience to see if the distinctions he made make sense, before
coming to the distinctions that were conceptual or abstract that were
what we really wanted to understand. All other previous philosophies
took the workings of consciousness for granted and merely spun
conceptual webs within that context. Even critical philosophy which
overcame dogma still did not explore the foundations of philosophy in
consciousness.

Analytical Philosophy still has this problem today. It is blind to the
context of consciousness even when it is exploring as an idea.
Consciousness is not just an idea, it is something that supports our
thinking and makes us possible to be rational beings.

[jruddy]

Kent,

You have got it right on in regard to Husserl's innovative looking at
and describing consciousness. He discovered an utterly new way of
looking at consciousness through intentionality. No one had ever done
that before.

Do you recall the in, as, from and for structures in Welton's schema?
(The Other Husserl, p. 22-23) I found that helpful and used it in my
new book. Check out what i wrote in http://www.xsacp.org. Also if you
are on Facebook (it's free to join), check out the group there
"Society for the Advancement of Convergent Phenomenology" where we
have discussion on Husserl's method.
Contact me back at jimr...@comcast.net. I don't use my gmail often.
On Facebook, I am the jim ruddy that got his Ph.D in Madras India. I
would like to send you some material and get some feedback.

Jim