Edmund Husserl Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Edmund Husserl - Essay Example In Husserl's characterization of conscious intentionality we see a kinship with Whitehead's notion of the vector character of experience: "The experiencer aims at the data even as the data aim at the experiencer" (). To explore this intentional structure of consciousness, Husserl attempts to develop a method to reveal the complex contents of consciousness as clearly as we experience a simple sense perception. But even a sense perception comes to us amid a lifetime of assumptions and beliefs about the cause and context of the perception. Husserl tries to work out a step-bystep series of phenomenological or eidetic "reductions" in which reality, as presented in our "naive" experience, is bracketed in hopes of bringing forth the structures that constitute phenomena (Hart 644). Husserl finds that the uniqueness of consciousness lies in the fact that the phenomena are "constituted" by conscious activities regarding the phenomena's essences (or meanings). Husserl does not mean to say that things are imaginary inventions. Entities are not created by consciousness, but their essences are constructed from the hyle, the stuff presented to the synthetic character of transcendental consciousness. Husserl describes these activities as meaning intentions of consciousness and fulfilling intentions of phenomena. For example, my awareness of my desk is not identical to the desk itself. The desk is solid, rectangular, and several feet wide, but my idea of the desk possesses none of those qualities. Although the hardness and size of the desk cannot physically enter my consciousness, they are somehow presented to me from the stuff of my idea of the desk (Hart 645). Husserl shows that this presentation is an exceedingly complex activity in which sense data take many forms and occur within a complicated array of potential sensations. But these sense data would be meaningless without the meaning intentions, the noetic activity of consciousness that assigns appropriate categories suc h as substance, quality, and explains the relations as the shape, size, of a material object; that is, noetic activities constitute the "whatness" of what is intended by consciousness (Schrag 278). For Husserl, the "detachment" proposed in any judgment, then, is the agreement of what is meant and what is given in fulfilling intentions. The difference between Husserl's transcendentalism and Heidegger's is found in the latter's attempt to express the way phenomena are constituted in terms deeper than Husserl's transcendental consciousness. (Hart 645). Husserl's attempt is far too idealistic, subjectivistic, and egoistic for Heidegger. In considering consciousness to provide the fundamental, presuppositionless beginning of philosophy, Husserl places himself squarely within the Cartesian tradition that takes the cogito to be prior to what Heidegger considers the ontological structure beneath, the sum. Husserl maintains the subject-object dichotomy so severely separated res cogitans and res extensa. Critics admit that Husserl goes far beyond Descartes in attempting to resolve how the activities of the knowing subject become connected to the known through the