Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, also known as Ideas I, is Edmund Husserl's second major
work after Logical Investigations. Husserl's
Ideas I presents a philosophy whose task is to clarify the meaning that
the world has for us in our daily lives. This is because the very life that the
phenomenologist reflects on has an intentional character that coincides with an
expanded notion of meaning that Husserl calls 'meaning' (Sinn). According
to him, the world is what our experience refers to and at the same time the
context in which we live. As a context the world is always something implicit.
So, in order to explain the meaning of this implicitness, it is first necessary
to stop supposing it as the foundation of the experience and recover it as the
objective term to which it refers. This is what the transcendental reduction
aims at.
Transcendental reduction and epoché in Idead I
In Ideas I is Husserl first
introduces the subject of the transcendental
reduction and epoché. This
reduction is a method through which Husserl proposes to access transcendental
subjectivity or pure consciousness through a series of steps or reductions. One of these
reductions is the eidetic reduction, which consists of taking objects that are
presented to consciousness as mere examples of essences that are obtained by
eidetic variation similar to his notions in the Logical Investigations).
One on the key ideas of Ideas
I is that of transcendental reduction as the suspension or bracketing of
the belief in the reality of the world. For Husserl, this reduction
radically discovers the world as a world lived in, because with the
disconnection of the belief in the reality of the world, the phenomenologist
necessarily concentrates on the field of lived consciousness in which it
appears and even acquires its character of reality. In other words, reduction
leads us to awareness of our own lived relation to things. Only by
Bracketing the world as a real world is it possible to pay attention to the
world as it is lived by us. While the transcendental reduction opens the field
of pure consciousness, the eidetic reduction allows us to capture what appears
there in terms of essences and essential relationships. The attitude in which
we live daily when we do not do philosophy is referred to by Husserl as natural attitude as opposed to a
transcendental attitude.
Noesis and Noema
Husserl observes that after
the transcendental reduction all intentional experience
continues to have a double structure: a noetic side and a noematic side.
While noesis refers to the way in which something is experienced, noema refers
to what the experience points to as its object. In the intentional correlation
between noesis and noema, experiences are interwoven in synthetic structures.
In response to this, we can speak of a syntax of experiences that is analogous
to that of language, but much more fundamental. Husserl called the study of
this assigning of meaning Constitution.
Impact of Ideas I
In later works after Ideas I
Husserl will propose various ways of carrying out the various reductions that
lead to transcendental subjectivity. From this work onwards it will be
clear to Husserl that the task of philosophy understood in this way is to explain
the origin and meaning of the world by reflecting on intentional
experience.
Husserl planned his Ideas
Relating to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy in three
volumes. The only finished volume was the first, which we have referred to in
this section. The second and third volumes were published posthumously.
Back
to: What is Phenomenology
Back
to: Things Themselves: Easy Intro to Husserl's Phenomenology
