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Adventures in Philosophy |
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by Edmund Husserl
All the essential characteristics of experience and consciousness which we have reached are for us necessary steps towards the attainment of the end which is unceasingly drawing us on, the discovery, namely, of the essence of that "pure" consciousness which is to fix the limits of the phenomenological field. Our inquiries were eidetic; but the individual instances of the essences we have referred to as experience, streak of experience, "consciousness" in all its senses, belonged as real events to the natural world. To that extent we have not abandoned the ground of the natural standpoint. Individual consciousness is interwoven with the natural world in a twofold way: it is some man's consciousness, or that of some man or beast, and in a large number at least of its particularizations it is a consciousness of this world. In respect now of this intimate attachment with the real world, what is meant by saying that consciousness has an essence "of its own", that with other consciousness it constitutes a self-contained connexion determined purely through this, its own essence, the connexion, namely, of the stream of consciousness? Moreover, since we can interpret consciousness in the widest sense to cover eventually whatever the concept of experience includes, the question concern the experience-stream's own essential nature and that of all its components. To what extent, in the first place, must the material world be fundamentally different in mind, excluded from the experiences' own essential nature? And if it is this, if over against all consciousness and the essential being proper to it, it is that which is "foreign" and "other", how can consciousness be interwoven with it, and consequently with the whole world that is alien to consciousness? For it is easy to convince oneself that the material world is not just any portion of the natural world, but its fundamental stratum to which all other real being is essentially related. It still fails to include the soul of men and animals; and the new factor which these introduce is first and foremost their "experiencing" together with their conscious relationship to the world surrounding them. But here consciousness and thinghood form a connected whole, connected within the particular psychological unities which we call animalia, and in the last resort within the real unity of the world as a whole. Can the unity of a whole be other than made one through the essential proper nature of its parts, which must therefore have some community of essence instead of a fundamental heterogeneity? To be clear, let us seek out the ultimate sources whence the general thesis of the world which I adopt when taking up the natural standpoint draws its nourishment, thereby enabling me as a conscious being to discover over against me an existing world of things, to ascribe to myself in this world a body, and to find for myself within this world a proper place. This ultimate source is obviously sensory experience. For our purpose, however, it is sufficient to consider sensory perception, which in a certain proper sense plays among experiencing acts the part of an original experience, whence all other experiencing acts draw a chief part of their power to serve as a ground. Every perceiving consciousness has this peculiarity, that it is the consciousness of the embodied (leibhaftigen) self-presence of an individual object, which on its own side and in a pure logical sense of the term is an individual or some logico-categorical modification of the same. In our own instance, that of sensory perception, or, in distincter terms, perception of a world of things, the logical individual is the Thing; and it is sufficient for us to treat the perception of things a representing all other perception (of properties, processes, and the like). The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a continuous perceiving, actual or potential. The world of things and our body within it are continuously present to our perception. How then does and can Consciousness itself separate out as a concrete thing in itself, from that within it, of which we are conscious, namely, the perceived being, "standing over against" consciousness "in and for itself"? I meditate first as would the man "in the street." I see and grasp the thing itself in its bodily reality. It is true that I sometimes deceive myself, and not only in respect of the perceived constitution of the thing, but also in respect of its being there at all. I am subject to an illusion or hallucination. The perception is not the "genuine." But if it is, if, that is, we can "confirm" its presence in the actual context of experience, eventually with the help of correct empirical thinking, then the perceived thing is real and itself really given, and that bodily in perception. Here perceiving considered simply as consciousness, and apart from the body and the bodily organs, appears as something in itself essenceless, an empty looking of an empty "Ego" towards the object itself which comes into contact with it in some astonishing way.
Excerpted from Ideas, by Edmund Husserl |
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