Husserl's Phenomenology II

It seems that quite a number of people were interested in Dr. Leung's talks. I saw some new faces. Probably, like me, they might have heard of the name of Husserl but had only the vaguest ideas about what he was doing with a subject with such a "strange" name. There must have been about some 20 or so people in the room. Of course, it might have helped that it was a Saturday afternoon and the talk was not scheduled for a weekday evening,  like the timing of some of the other talks.

Dr. Leung appeared to be quite a young Ph. D. She said her doctoral thesis was about Heidegger. Since Heidegger was one of Husserl's students who later diverged from some of the views of his former master, she first got to know about Husserl through the necessarily negative eyes of Heidegger. However, she said that her views about Husserl underwent a radical change after she helped her teacher in Beijing with translating an English book about Husserl into Chinese. That book was Don Weldon's "The Other Husserl: the horizons of transcendental phenomenology" (2000). According to her, this book helps many to revise their views about Husserl by covering certain new materials not previously discovered. But she said that Husserl himself was partly to blame for not having made his own views known earlier. She speculated that that might be because when his first book Philosophical Investigations appeared, a book heavily affected by the psychological views of Brentano, it was not very well received and thereafter, he sort of abandoned his psychological views and veered completely over to logical and rational views. It was not until much later, when he discovered that he could not explain many phenomena without the assistance of psychology that he reverted once more back to his previous psychological views. 

Dr. Leung said that we can discern two phases in the development of Husserl's phenomenology. The first phase could be described as his "static" phase. In that first phase, he approached phenomena "horizontally". He analyzed various phenomena observed as if they were a cross-section: what constitutes a "phemonenon" , how to properly describe its structures from a first person perspective, how a person's "intentionality" affects his perception of the world outside of himself. He studies and analyzes what is perception, imagination, thought or volition in our consciousness. In this stage, he was still heavily affected by the methods of mathematic logic of Bolzano in his theory of how science explores the world. For the scientist, as for Descartes, we must look for a secure foundation of our knowledge by doubting everything it is possible to doubt until we find something it is impossible to reasonably doubt. To him, we can believe that something is true until we find that someone challenges our views whereupon, we will re-examine our first view and make the necessary adjustments to our earlier view. To Husserl, when we perceive the world, we always perceive it in relation to our "intention" or our "purpose" in trying to understand it,  usually in relation to some possible later action. At this stage, he was still trying to seek a secure foundation of knowledge, some subjective ideas about things at a specific point in time. In his book Ideas I (1913),, he introduced a distinction between noema ( the ideal object of consciousness)  and noesis, our subjective conception of noema, or the object as "intended" by us and the phenomenn becomes the object as perceived or as it appears to our consciousness.

According to Dr. Leung, Husserl found that his initial theory was unable to account for many other phenomena. As he delved deeper into man's relations to reality, he found that it was impossible to understand what is reality without taking into account man's mutlifarious relationship with the external world, which appear to operate with rules of its own not entirely traceble to man's subjective purposes and often despite them. He therefore began to pay more attention to how our consciousness may be affected by its own personal history and how society itself may be affected by its own history and in addition by its own plans and projects. He therefore went into the second phase, the "vertical" or "dynamic" phase in the development of his phenomenology. In this second phase, he found that he could not do so without taking into account the effect of "time" and not just "space" and of how time may affect the world of space and people. He then wrote "On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Cartesian Meditations (1931), the Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936/54) and Experience and Judgement (1939). He thus started on a new phase, one which has been called "transcendental phenomenology" the core concept of which is the idea of "genesis". In this development, he was much influenced by the ideas of Georg Misch. To him, the phenomenology of genesis ( how come to we discover what our consciousness in fact find) is affected by a number of factors related to the subject: our own habits, our capacity to be affected by secondary qualities of the objects of our consciousness (the values of our society, including the views of other people) , the role played by the human body in this perceptual process (how in the process of perceiving things, we have to rely upon our body and our brain) and our motives in acting in certain ways (how our attention on what in the extenral environment we in fact find may be affected by what our subjective need of action in that external environment in the particular personal situations we find ourselves at a particular point in time) . He also found that what we find may also be affected by the historicity, the sedimentation of history and the actual life-world and life-situation that the subject may find himself in at the moment that he seeks to discover what is there in the external world, which itself includes as part of that extenral world, other people and their own consciousness. Husserl found that to understand something or a phenomenon, we must trace it to its source, its history and the relevant motivation of people in the past and that we are intricably intermeshed with the object of our consciousness in mutually interactive ways. 

What I am most surprised at in this talk is why it should be that Husserl needed more than 10 years to discover something which he thought was new, something which any ordinary people who has a modicum of common sense would have been able to find out without any serious philosophical investigation viz. that how we look at things may be affected by our own prior knowledge, our own previous experience, our habitual attitudes of thought and action, the views of the other people we meet and more generally the social, intellectual history of the society in which we live and also by our interaction with the world in which we live and have our being and how not only can we affect that world, we can and must be affected by that external world too, both social and intellectual.

What I find most interesting is that I was able to get a bird's eye view of the development of Western philosophy starting from Plato, Aristotle (Platonism) who thought that there is some objective reality which is eternally there but independent of man, through the rationalism of Descartes,who thought that reality may be accessed through the use of our reason by the exericse of doubt but that there is an inseparable gulf between subjectivity and objectivity which operates in parallel in our world (dualism) and then through to Kant, who taught us that what we may think of as objective reality is not really objective reality but always and already objective reality mediated through the innate categories of our own mind (Kantianism) and then on to Husserl (transcendental phenomenology) who thought that whilst we can access the external world only through our own consciousness, even the subjectivity of our own consciousness is affected by objective external factors like the world in which we live and the subjective views of other people in that world and that it is impossible to neatly separate subjectivity from objectivity, or the self and the world! What he did is that he tried to give a measure of "objectivity" to that "subjectivity" by "generalizing" the structures of such individual subjectivity into structures shared in common by all other "subjects".