2. Phenomenology's Critique of Naturalism

One of the most consistent traits of philosophy on the European continent over the twentieth century has been its resolute non-naturalism and its associated anti-realism. Phenomenology in this regard is wedded to anti-naturalism. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who founded phenomenology, was to the forefront in identifying naturalism as the dominant philosophical position of the age. In his famous paper ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’Footnote ⁸ (1910/1911) he defined naturalism and demanded that it receive a ‘radical critique’Footnote ⁹, which he explained as a ‘positive critique in terms of foundations and methods’.Footnote ¹⁰ Husserl's relentless critique of naturalism began roughly around 1905 with the discovery of the phenomenological reduction, which allowed him to contemplate the meaning-constituting character of subjectivity freed from our natural convictions about the existing ‘real’ world, continued and intensified to the very end of his life. Husserl believes very strongly that naturalism – which he associated with a parallel commitment to physicalism and, in his day, to sense-data positivism – was a betrayal of the very essence of science. In the Crisis §13 (1936), Husserl speaks of ‘physicalistic naturalism’ and extended the term ‘naturalism’ to cover every ‘objectivistic philosophy’.Footnote ¹¹ Already in his 1906/7 Lectures on Logic and Epistemology Footnote ¹² he characterises psychologism as the ‘specifically epistemological sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost of philosophy, and unfortunately also the original sin that human beings awakened from the state of epistemological innocence necessarily lapse into’.Footnote ¹³ It is the original fall from grace to misconstrue consciousness: ‘the mixing up of consciousness and mind, of theory of knowledge and psychology’.Footnote ¹⁴ The critique of psychologism is extended into the critique of naturalism. Naturalism betrays the very essence of science. It misunderstands the world because it misunderstands the subject's necessary role in the project of knowledge, and in the very constitution of objectivity. One cannot subtract the knowing subject from the process of knowledge, and treat the desiccated product as if it were the real world. The real world, for Husserl, as for Kant, always involves a necessary intertwining of subject and object. This is an essential transcendental point of view and it has been present in European philosophy at least since the eighteenth century, and – if we are to believe Husserl – it is in fact inaugurated with Descartes' breakthrough discovery of the cogito ergo sum, which unfortunately he then went on to misconstrue in a naturalist manner.

3. The Transcendental Approach

In his critique of naturalism, Husserl found an ally in the Neo-Kantian movement. Thus, in a letter dated 20 December 1915 to the leading Neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), Husserl commented that he found himself in alliance with German idealism against the ‘our common enemy’ (als unseren gemeinsamen Feind) – the ‘naturalism of our time’.Footnote ¹⁵ Just a few years earlier, the Neo-Kantian Jonas Cohn (1869–1947) had written to Husserl in 1911, after his Logos article appeared, to emphasise their broad agreement concerning their ‘battle-position (Kampfstellung) against naturalism and historicism’.Footnote ¹⁶ At the other end of his career, in his ‘Vienna Lecture’ of May 1935 Husserl claims that the very ‘rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through a heroism of reason’ is required to overcome naturalism once and for all.Footnote ¹⁷ Husserl's answer to naturalism, then, is to take a resolute and consistent transcendental stance involving the application of a bracketing of existential commitments and a refocusing of awareness. As he writes in 1928: ‘The transcendental problem arises from a general turning around of the natural focus of consciousness […]’.Footnote ¹⁸

In the Crisis Husserl characterises the transcendental attitude as follows:

In the Crisis, moreover, Husserl explicitly claims that transcendental idealism is the only philosophy to have successfully resisted the lure of naturalism.Footnote ²⁰ This, of course, is simply restating a commitment that began at least as early as 1908Footnote ²¹ but which was first articulated in print – much to the disappointment of Husserl's realist followers—in the programmatic Ideas I (1913).Footnote ²² True phenomenology must become a resolutely anti-naturalistic ‘pure’ or ‘transcendental’ – the terms are equivalent in Ideas I – science of subjectivity, focusing on the essential nature of epistemic achievements, expunged of all reference to ‘worldly’ or ‘mundane’ events.

The transcendental viewpoint is a way of bypassing the kinds of epistemic and metaphysical commitments that are embedded in the attitude of naïve natural experience. The transcendental phenomenologist no longer focuses on the fully formed products of conscious experience – the objects of knowledge – but on the constituting role of intentional subjectivity and intersubjectivity, seeking to identify the modes of appearing, the syntheses, associations, and intertwinings, that are at work in the constitution of the stable abiding world. In other words, transcendental inquiry focuses on how objectivity – and the objective world that we naïvely experience and take for real – comes about, how it is constituted, how it is ‘meaning loaded’ as it were. Indeed Husserl believes the solution to all perennial philosophical problems requires a transcendental non-natural inquiry into the life of consciousness (Bewusstseinsleben) – something empirical psychology, which hitherto had claimed that function, is utterly ill-equipped to do. As Husserl proclaims in a 1924 lecture to the Kant Society in Frankfurt:

Husserl's basic principle is transcendental idealist: priority must be given to the activities of intentional consciousness in the constitution of the world: ‘[…] nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness [Bewusstseinsleistung]’.Footnote ²⁴

4. Husserl's Critique of Psychologism and Naturalism

What exactly did Husserl mean by naturalism? Initially, his target in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, the first volume of his ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1900–1901)Footnote ²⁵ was the psychologism prevalent in the logical theories of J.S. Mill, J.E. Erdmann and others. Here Husserl sided with Frege in sharply distinguishing between the psychological processes that engender thoughts and the ideal objective validities that the thoughts instantiate. Later, when he spoke of naturalism, he meant specifically the positivism of his contemporaries especially Auguste Comte and Ernst Mach, but he also traced the tendency back to the atomistic ‘sensualism’ of Hobbes and Locke, Berkeley, Hume and even a ‘naturalised Kant’.Footnote ²⁶ As we shall see, Husserl thought the Neo-Kantians in particular had been seduced into a naturalistic misinterpretation of their master's thought. Naturalism, for Husserl, is really an interconnected cluster of notions. In general, naturalism embraces the view that the methods of the natural sciences provide the only road to truth; as Husserl says: ‘the naturalist […] sees nothing but nature and first and foremost physical nature’.Footnote ²⁷ Naturalism, for Husserl, is the outlook that assumes that the physical sciences give an accurate account of the furniture of the world. He saw it also as including inherently a commitment to physicalism – the view that the natural sciences (and especially physics) give the best account of the furniture of the universe. Sometimes Husserl distinguishes between the natural attitude of all humans in their approach to the world – characterized as Weltglaube or ‘belief in the world’ – and the specifically ‘naturalistic attitude’ which is a product of a reification of the point of view of the natural sciences. Indeed, it is part of Husserl's diagnosis of the evolution of modern philosophy that the natural attitude, which predates philosophical inquiry and underpins all scientific inquiry, has been systematically transformed into the naturalistic attitude – whereby nature is construed according to the framework of the sciences. This subtle shift in the nature of the natural attitude in complex modern societies is responsible for the complete inability to understand the life of consciousness.

With regard to modern philosophy, Husserl sees naturalism as emerging from the empiricist commitment to the flow of conscious experience as being analyzable into atoms of sense-data (‘sensualism’). The Crisis describes the progress of objectivism in modern philosophy until it foundered on the rocks of Hume's critique. Thereafter a new transcendentalism – initially opened up by Descartes but immediately obscured – emerged to challenge objectivism.Footnote ²⁸ Concerning Hobbes, for instance, Husserl writes in the Crisis that Hobbes is a physicalistic naturalist: ‘The naturalism of a Hobbes wants to be physicalism, and like all physicalism it follows the model of physical rationality. This is also true of the other sciences of the modern period’.Footnote ²⁹

Interestingly in a footnote Husserl distinguishes this kind of physicalism from the physicalist philosophies of the Vienna Circle Logical Positivists:

In a supplementary text to the Crisis, Husserl identifies naturalism with physicalism:

A major problem here, as Husserl notes, is that the peculiar syntheses of our temporal consciousness are not taken into account in the objectivist understanding of temporality in nature. As Husserl often acknowledges, the British philosopher John Locke is, for him, the archetypal naturalist, but even the Irish immaterialist George Berkeley is accused of being trapped in a tabula rasa naturalism following Locke.Footnote ³² Husserl writes that Locke ignored the Cartesian discovery of intentionality (cogito-cogitatum) and misunderstood consciousness as a place where experiences are recorded: ‘[…] in naïve naturalism the soul is now taken to be like an isolated space, like a writing tablet, in his [Locke's] famous simile, on which psychic data come and go’.Footnote ³³

In Husserl's version of the history of modern philosophy, David Hume, on the other hand, both completes and at the same time, by his relocation of causation in mental habit and association, overcomes Berkeley's naturalism.Footnote ³⁴ Hume's naturalism of consciousness resolves subjectivity into atoms of consciousness, into final material elements which are organised under material rules of co-existence and succession,Footnote ³⁵ but at least he sheds light on the deep associative links that stitch experience together into a coherent whole. Husserl writes about Hume in his 1924 Kant Gesellschaft lecture ‘Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy’:

In the Crisis, even Franz Brentano, the discoverer of intentionality and Husserl's own teacher, is criticised for his naturalist tendency:

In the Crisis Husserl also singles out the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt as buying into the new kind of ‘monistic naturalism’:

Already in Ideas I (1913), Husserl had come to identify naturalism with empiricism (as is clear from the analytical index compiled by his student Gerda Walther – naturalism ‘see also empiricism’).Footnote ³⁹ In his Introduction to that work Husserl says that phenomenology must be conceived as an a priori science of essence and a defence of eidetic intuition ‘in opposition to naturalism’.Footnote ⁴⁰ He acknowledges the praiseworthy motives of ‘empiricistic naturalism’ as a ‘radicalism of cognitive practice’ in seeking to overcome the ‘idols’ (a reference to Francis Bacon's Novum Organon, where he identifies four idols: idols of the Tribe, idols of the Cave, idols of the Marketplace and idols of the Theatre) of tradition and superstition.Footnote ⁴¹ In particular, however, classic empiricism is deficient because it does not understand the nature of essences (here he is repeating his analysis as found in the Second Logical Investigation), and indeed in this regard empiricism is a form of nominalism. Empiricism recognises individuals and not universals and, by misunderstanding the nature of categorial intuition, has no ground for making the claim that ‘all valid thinking is based on intuition’.Footnote ⁴² The fundamental theses of empiricism need more precise grounding. In Ideas III §8, Husserl refers to the ‘naturalism predominating so greatly among psychologists, as among all natural scientists’.Footnote ⁴³ Empiricism and naturalism must be given up if one is to understand the true nature of essence inspection or ‘essence viewing’ (Wesensschau).

Even Kant does not escape the diagnosis of naturalism. Husserl's assessment that the version of Kant being promulgated by the Neo-Kantians of his day was imbued with naturalism is most interesting given the resurgence of interest in a naturalized Kant in the work of John McDowell and other contemporary Kantians.Footnote ⁴⁴ Interestingly, in Husserl's day, German debates about naturalism primarily revolved around the issue of whether the methods of natural science were sufficient for all systematic knowing or whether they needed to be supplemented by the separate methodologies of the cultural sciences or Geisteswissenschaften (Dilthey, Rickert, Windelband). Part of the power of Husserl's ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’ essay is that he is not satisfied merely to criticise naturalism in favour of embracing a cultural approach. In fact, he is equally vigorous in criticising what he sees as historicism (Dilthey – without naming him) as itself being caught up in the same snare as naturalism, and as also leading to sceptical relativism. Historicism tends also to lock the meaning of an event into the worldview that revealed it. It is thus a form of relativism.

5. Naturalism in the Sciences of Culture and the Phenomenological Concept of the Life-World

It would be useful to raise the issue of the methodology – and indeed the object – of the cultural sciences in relation to contemporary naturalism, although it cannot be discussed more fully here. In recent decades, evolutionary biology as well as applications of the neurosciences (e.g. ‘neuro-economics’) have been brought to bear on explanations in the study of culture,Footnote ⁴⁵ but much of this work is speculative and indeed highly questionable in terms of the kind of explanatory model it tries to impose on what it understands as ‘culture’. In other words, it understands culture in purely objectivist terms in terms of a limited number of concepts such as inherited ‘traits’, ‘behaviour’, tool-use, and so on, and does not grasp the notion of a living intersubjective world of signification and meaning-making. Husserlian phenomenology, on the other hand, recognises that human beings start from the already given and meaningful ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt) which is also the world of ‘everydayness’ (Alltäglichkeit) in which temporality is lived out according to its own peculiar pattern.Footnote ⁴⁶

In this life-world, there is no split between nature and culture. Husserl speaks of the ‘intertwining’ (Verflechtung) or interpenetration between nature (as the object of the sciences and natural experience) and spirit (as culture) in the life-world.Footnote ⁴⁷ The life-world is always the intentional correlate or counterpart of human experiencing, acting and valuing, of life in the natural and personal attitudes. The life-world, then, has to be understood as including the overlapping sets of objects which surround us in life as perceptual objects, instruments and tools, food, clothing, shelter, art objects, religious objects, and so on. The life-world therefore encompasses both the world of what has traditionally been designated as ‘nature’, as it presents itself to us in our everyday dealings with it, including rocks, mountains, sky, plants, animals, planets, stars, and so on) as well as what is usually known as the world of ‘culture’, including ourselves, other persons, animals in their social behaviour, social institutions, artefacts, symbolic systems such as languages, religions – in others words, our overall natural and cultural environing world.

The life-world resists a complete description and analysis; it cannot be entirely delineated, because, as human subjects, we belong to the life-world and cannot take a stance (other than as an artifice of method) to step outside the life-world to which we essentially and necessarily belong. Furthermore, the life-world cannot be understood as a static context since it includes the idea of historical evolution and development; it somehow includes and shades off into the ‘non real’ horizon of past and future. The life-world is a world of cumulative tradition acquired through what Husserl calls sedimentation (Sedimentierung),Footnote ⁴⁸ according to which certain earlier experiences become passively enfolded in our on-going experience, just as language retains earlier meanings in its etymologies. As Husserl says in an associated late text ‘Origin of Geometry’, ‘cultural structures, appear on the scene in the form of tradition; they claim, so to speak, to be ‘sedimentations’ (Sedimentierungen) of a truth-meaning that can be made originally self-evident'.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, Husserl also characterises ‘sedimentation’ as ‘traditionalisation’.Footnote ⁵⁰ For every intentional act, there is a background of inactive presuppositions that are sedimented but still functioning implicitly.Footnote ⁵¹ Sedimentation is in fact a necessary feature of temporal, historical, and cultural life. The present contains traces of the past; our language, similarly, necessarily preserves meaningsFootnote ⁵² that can be accessed and taken over by us as speakers. This dynamic meaning making – rather like a snowball rolling downhill and gathering what it encounters into its own form – needs to be understood in its own terms.

6. The Misconstrual of Experience in Naturalistic Psychology

Much of the time, Husserl is less interested in naturalism in philosophy as whole, rather than in the pernicious effects of naturalism in psychology, which had assumed the role of the science of consciousness and subjectivity. Psychology, for Husserl, is the bastard science that has lost its way. In his First Philosophy lectures (1923–24) he writes:

Naturalistic psychology misunderstands or ignores the peculiarities of the temporal flow of conscious experiences, with its real and non-real (‘ideal’) parts – whether they be the ideal meanings or the non real parts of retentions, protentions and other ‘horizonal’ features of experience. Indeed, the very concept of the horizon of our experience – whether this means the non-disclosed empty significations involved in our perceptions or the temporal retentions and protentions that accompany and make sense of present experience – is something which naturalism cannot accommodate. Naturalism also reifies the ego. A full catalogue of the activities of consciousness, what Husserl calls the ‘ABC of consciousness’ cannot be carried out by a naturalistic psychology. It misconstrues the essential nature of psychical acts and operations.

It is clear that psychology does not understand the horizonal and meaning-constituting features of consciousness with its syntheses, intertwinings, and so on. Husserl claims that his new phenomenological psychology offers an entirely new way of describing subjectivity in terms of its intentional acts, meaning-constitution, syntheses, and intentional implicated horizons, and essential structures in their living interconnections, an account on a completely different level to anything achievable by scientific psychology, trapped as it is in its naturalistic and sensualist paradigm. As he puts it in the Crisis, psychology and transcendental philosophy are ‘allied with each other in a peculiar and inseparable way’ due to the complex relations between the psychological, ‘worldly’ or ‘mundane’ ego and the transcendental ego.Footnote ⁵⁵ For Husserl, psychology and transcendental philosophy share an interest in the nature of the ego, its self-consciousness, and its intentional consciousness directed not just at objects in the world but at others (in empathy), all considered within the constant backdrop of a universal world-horizon. It is equally important to note, as Husserl repeatedly stresses, that transcendental insights can be misconstrued (and indeed were misconstrued in the tradition stemming from Hume and Kant) as psychological insights in a naturalistic setting. While translation is possible, so also is misunderstanding, and to date, philosophy has not properly understood the transcendental domain.

7. Objectivism and the Recognition of Point-of-View

Husserl correctly sees that naturalism is really a kind of generalised objectivism which thinks of the world exclusively from the point of view of science, what is often called ‘the view from above’ or ‘God's eye perspective’. In Ideas I he speaks of the reification' (Verdinglichung) of the world, and its ‘philosophical absolutizing’ (Verabsolutierung).Footnote ⁵⁶ Husserl thinks that naturalism and objectivism are self-contradictory positions because they assume a standpoint that thinks it is not a standpoint, a point of view – what Thomas Nagel calls ‘the view from nowhere’Footnote ⁵⁷ which takes a very particular slant on experience and identifies only certain features, disregarding especially the contribution that comes from the point of view itself. One might consider the analogy with a map which represents the streets as seen from above. Naturalists assume that this kind of objectivist perspective can be supplemented – with ever increasing detail (e.g. Google's ‘street-view’) – such that it can be made comprehensively objective. Phenomenology, on the other hand, wants to point out that each perspective – including the ‘street-view’ – occupies a particular (and uninterrogated, often undisclosed) point of view which must be assessed and evaluated in its own terms. It is this attention to perspective that pushed post-Husserlian phenomenology in an hermeneutic direction.

For Husserl, objectivism takes a stance that does not know it is a stance. Consider the sentence that we often hear from scientists and public commentators: ‘Let us look at it objectively’. How is it possible to say this? How is it possible for an embodied subject or group of subjects, embedded or ‘thrown’ into a time, place, history, embodiment, language and educational formation, to take a position (to look at something or consider it) that transcends one's own subjectivity and claims to be not just an objective but the objective way of seeing the experience? To be objective in this manner means to engage in a kind of cancellation of one's own subjectivity, to engage in self-transcendence or some kind of self-cancellation. In what sense is it possible for the subject to do this? Of course, modern scientific method claims to be a set of procedures that precisely uncouples the subject from the experience and allows for an objective view of the situation. A certain kind of transcendence of the particular subjective experience is an inalienable part of all experience, phenomenology itself recognises. Every experience can be reflected on, put in context, modified by memories and so on. In fact, the phenomenological approaches of Husserl and Heidegger like to emphasize a particular kind of transcendence involved in the very act of intending, in the fundamental act that makes consciousness reach beyond itself, very well described in metaphorical terms by Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance. The idea that human consciousness has to negate or transcend itself in order to reach the ‘in itself’ is at the very core of Sartre's philosophy. But this self-transcendence is understood by phenomenology as precisely that which makes possible the transcendental stance. This is very puzzling and difficult to articulate. Husserl speaks of the ‘splitting of the ego’ (Ich-Spaltung). It clearly gives the notion of the transcendental quite a different sense to the one encountered in Kant for instance. Husserl – like Kant – defends the naïve (‘empirical’) realism of our everyday experience in the life-world while at the same time defending a transcendental idealism or anti-realism, according to which the spatial, temporal, causal and sensorial organisation of our experience is something that comes from the a priori structures of subjectivity and intersubjectivity.

It is here that the notions of the phenomenological and transcendental reductions become operative, which takes Husserl far beyond Kant. Husserl recognised that it must be possible to reflect on experience in a way that the original structures that permeate straight-forward experience (and especially its ‘world-belief’) can be suspended. Husserl wants straightforward natural reflection to be recast methodologically as a transcendental reflection where the contribution of the participating subject is highlighted in the constitution of the experience. Husserl writes in the Crisis:

In other words, although the ancient sceptics in particular raised the question of the mode of being and mode of validity of the very experience of the world, this sceptical questioning was never harnessed to become the application of the phenomenological-transcendental epochē that allows the structural a priori of subjectivity in its contribution to world formation to come to light. Yet the realm of these a priori correlations is immense – and potentially infinite. Already in his 1917 Inaugural Address to Freiburg University Husserl had spoken of this a priori correlation: ‘To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.’Footnote ⁵⁹

One of the distinctive features of the French philosopher Quintin Meillassoux's recent discussion of correlationism is that it removes the reference to idealism.Footnote ⁶⁰ Husserl is undoubtedly a correlationist in Meillassoux's sense – indeed the arch-correlationist. There is no objectivity without subjectivity and no subjectivity without objectivity. However Husserl makes a further claim (hence his idealism) that consciousness is absolute and ‘unsurpassable’ (Unhintergehbar) which is not at all the case with objective being, which for him is always secondary to the life of temporal consciousness. While Husserl is a confirmed Platonic realist about the kinds of idealities required in all thinking – and especially in mathematical and scientific thinking – he is an anti-realist and a transcendental idealist about the manner in which these idealities come to be. Indeed, in his later works, the problem of ‘being’ (Sein), of ‘reality’ or ‘actuality’ (Wirklichkeit) for Husserl always resolves into the question of how we constitute or consider it – its ‘being-sense’ (Seinssinn). In this regard, Husserl's masterful insight which disarms much of previous philosophy is to claim that reality or being is precisely a particular sense that belongs to objects as they appear or are made manifest in the natural attitude. What is primary is not the real but precisely the view, the attitude, the mind-set, the approach, the manifestation, the givenness, not what is given in the givenness. Husserl refers to this taking of perspectives as ‘positing takings’ (Stellungnahme) and calls a point of view or perspective an Einstellung (‘attitude’ or ‘mind-set’). Husserl's student Eugen Fink (1905–1975) points out that an attitude is more than a stance in life or even a world view. It is something that holds through all the attitudes; it is the ‘default’ position of human beings. The natural attitude is what makes us human; it is the specifically human attitude (and of course it intersects with the attitudes of animals). Fink writes:

For Fink, this is best expressed by his term Befangenheit, a term that can mean shyness or prejudice or bias, but is best translated as ‘captivation’ by the world. In the natural attitude we are captivated by the world and the natural sciences explicate this world in formalised terms.

8. Ineliminable Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity

Husserl was deeply influenced by the philosopher and psychologist Paul Natorp (1854–1924) who had insisted that consciousness was in essence non-objectifiable since it is the seat of manifestation, and can only be reified or objectified when it becomes the specific focus of knowledge.Footnote ⁶² While conceding that there is a peculiar and ineliminable subjective element to knowing, Husserl maintains that through careful phenomenological methodology we can uncover the structuring features of subjective consciousness (without objectifying the ego and its activities).

For the mature Husserl, objectivity is a peculiar achievement of subjectivity and indeed of subjects cooperating together in harmonious intersubjectivity. Husserl was one of the first to diagnose that ‘science’ is not just an objective process of the accumulation of knowledge that proceeds by itself along its own objective causal rules, but is driven by human interests, by finite, limited subjects. The peer reviewing process which is currently the foundation stone for scientific objectivity might be a good example to illustrate how a consensus style of objectivity is arrived at by the intertwining of the efforts of very subjective and partial participants. The peer-reviewing system drives scientific discovery as much as complex instrumentation, formal statistical methods and laboratories. But the peer reviewing system is a system of subjectivities functioning together – and one can examine it critically from many different standpoints including ones that identify sociological factors, ideology, state interference, systems of domination, and so on.Footnote ⁶³ Just as the objectivity of the sciences depends on subjective and intersubjective practices, Husserl's concept of objectivity is equally one of shared intersubjective consensus, agreement or disagreement (we can agree to disagree, append minority reports, and so on – there are procedures for negotiating lack of agreement). The transcendental approach to scientific knowledge recognises that researchers arrive at the truth more or less in the manner in which a scientific committee or a jury arrives at a final decision.

Husserl does recognise the peculiar openness to others even of our most supposedly private subjective experiences. Thus in his analysis of perception, it is a fundamental feature for Husserl that I perceive objects as perceivable by others. When I perceive a physical object through a particular profile or ‘adumbration’ (Abschattung), as when I see the table from my standpoint in the room, at the same time, I recognise through a special kind of accompanying intuition, that the object is something in principle perceivable by others in the same situation as myself. Furthermore, there are other sides or profiles of the object which others may in fact perceive directly but which I intend only in an empty manner. Husserl analyses this perceptual situation with great subtlety. There is an ‘excess’ (Überschuss) already built into perceptual experience. There is an inherent openness to others inbuilt in my experience that prevents my experience being entirely private.

In his Thing and Space lectures of 1907Footnote ⁶⁴ Husserl gives his most detailed analysis of the essence of the perception of spatial objects. Here and elsewhere he points to an essential and ‘a radical incompleteness’ (eine radicale Unvollständigkeit) of perception.Footnote ⁶⁵ We have the sense of a ‘more’ attaching to the object. Husserl speaks elsewhere of a plus ultra given in the empty horizon of our perception.Footnote ⁶⁶ Husserl prefers to speak of it as an excess, an overflowing. There is an ‘excess’ which is a permanent structural feature of external perception. The perception of its essence always promises more than it actually supplies: ‘External perception is a constant pretension to accomplish something that, by its very nature, it is not in a position to accomplish’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Husserl distinguishes between what is ‘properly’ or ‘genuinely’ (eigentlich) or narrowly given in perception and what is improperly co-intended. We see the front side of a house but we grasp it as an object possessing other sides. There can be no ‘proper’ intuition of an object from all sides. A material, spatial thing unveils itself in endless profiles. Husserl maintains that even an infinite all knowing God can perceive a physical thing only according to unfolding profiles because this belongs to the very essence of perception.Footnote ⁶⁸ Similarly a material thing also reveals itself in perception in a series of temporal moments. Not even God can alter this eidetic truth.Footnote ⁶⁹ There is then no God's eye perspective; there is no complete objective picture of reality which gives it all at once. Existence and the unfolding of experience are essentially and inescapably temporal and partial.

Furthermore, the nature of conscious experience is such that there are non-real or possible dimensions of meaning that can become actualised by the subject in ways that transform the nature of the experience. Consider a child playing with a banana and pretending it is a telephone. Is the child a complete fantasist who thinks the banana really is a telephone? If the child is asked ‘who is talking on the phone?’ she may answer that she is talking to her doll or whatever. She will continue the game. But if she asked to eat the banana she may very well respond by eating it. If she is asked to eat the telephone she may hesitate. There is a dual perception involved even in many of our simplest experiences. Psychologists struggle to identify these more precisely and there is much disagreement about whether children can detach themselves from their own attitudes to look at them askew as it were. But it is clear that experience involves the occupation of many different stances – many of which are also intertwined.

9. The Phenomenon of Worldhood and the Personalistic Attitude

A large puzzle for Husserl is how we have a sense of world at all. Thus in the Crisis he asserts:

How self-consciousness and world-consciousness are possible are themselves transcendental questions.

One of the main features of Husserl's transcendental and anti-naturalist approach is that he emphasises the primacy of what he terms in Ideas II the personalistic attitude. First and foremost, the naïve natural attitude of everyday living in the world is actually a personal or interpersonal attitude. The world we experience is a human social and cultural world. The personalistic attitude is defined by Husserl as follows: ‘[…] the attitude we are always in when we live with one another, talk to one another, shake hands with another in greeting, or are related to another in love and aversion, in disposition and action, in discourse and discussion’.Footnote ⁷¹

The world we experience in this personalistic attitude is absolutely not to be identified with the world of physics (construed in terms of energy, mass, etc.) or the world as construed by naturalism (human beings understood as biological systems in organic contact with a biosphere). It is a life-world of common-or-garden use objects. For instance, gardeners divide plants into weeds and flowers; these are not botanical classifications but classifications that arise in gardening practice. Husserl writes:

In this sense, Husserl is deeply opposed to the kind of naturalising programme that was proposed by the Vienna Circle manifesto which promoted a ‘scientific conception of the world’.Footnote ⁷³ According to the Manifesto: ‘The scientific world conception is characterized not so much by theses of its own, but rather by its basic attitude, its points of view and direction of research. The goal ahead is unified science’.

It is interesting to note that the Vienna Circle positivists see the scientific conception as a specific attitude, correcting and replacing the naïve attitude of experience, namely, precisely what Husserl would have termed the ‘natural attitude’. The proposed methodology of the Vienna Circle – logical analysis – was in part inspired by the logical atomism of Bertrand Russell. Indeed, Russell is quoted in the Manifesto as proposing the steady replacement of life-world ‘generalities’ with more precise verifiable statements:‘It [Logical atomism] represents, I believe, the same kind of advance as was introduced into physics by Galileo: the substitution of piecemeal, detailed and verifiable results for large untested generalities recommended only by a certain appeal to imagination.’Footnote ⁷⁴

Contemporary versions of this programme of substitution can be found, for instance, in the eliminative materialism of the Churchlands.Footnote ⁷⁵ But it is precisely this programme of attempting to remove the life-world and replace it with an entirely scientific superstructure that is challenged by phenomenology. For Husserl, the rich domain of lived cultural experience will never be understood if it is seen as merely constructed on top of a pre-existing natural order which is regarded as prior and even as more real. Husserl writes: ‘A univocal determination of spirit through merely natural dependencies is unthinkable, i.e. as reduction to something like physical nature […] Subjects cannot be dissolved into nature, for in that case what gives nature its sense would be missing.’Footnote ⁷⁶

Rather it is the case that what we consider as real depends on our own intentions and interests: ‘All real mundane objectivity is constituted accomplishment in this sense, including that of men and animals and thus also that of ‘souls’'.Footnote ⁷⁷ And similarly Husserl writes in the Cartesian Meditations: ‘Every sort of existent itself, real or ideal, becomes understandable as a “product” of transcendental subjectivity, a product constituted in just that performance’.Footnote ⁷⁸ It is the function of transcendental philosophy to display ‘the essential rootedness of any objective world in transcendental subjectivity’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Husserl's transcendental idealism is not, however, a solipsistic idealism. The experience of the ego is at the same time the experience of other egos. For Husserl, it is impossible to conceive of an ego except as belonging to a community of other egos or what he calls, borrowing from Leibniz ‘monads’. To conceive of two communities of monads separated from one another is a priori impossible because I as ego am jointly conceiving both.Footnote ⁸⁰ A community of monads, then, is possible only as a unity and hence the objective world which is constituted by the community of monads can only be one world.

For Husserl, it is a major problem for transcendental phenomenology to analyse how the objective world is constituted out of the intersubjective community of monads. Husserl speaks of monads ‘implicating’ or ‘implying’ each other. His overall answer seems to depend on the notions of position-taking, modifying a position, and implication. Transcendental life can only be expressed in terms of personal and interpersonal life, which is, in Husserl's terms, a life of ‘implication’ (something like the ‘space of reasons’ expanded to include the ‘space of motivations’ and the ‘space of associations’), reciprocity' and ‘analogization’. In other words, the entire experience of the world, including the experience of the natural world (wherein naturalism is focused), is something which is constituted by the harmonious intersection of subjectivities.Footnote ⁸¹ Phenomenology's emphasis on this transcendental intersubjectivity challenges the naturalist programme in the most fundamental of ways. In his writings on empathy as collected in the Intersubjectivity volumes, naturalism in psychology is criticised for its commitment to psychic individualism which misunderstands completely what German idealism called Gemeingeist or social spirit – collective unities that Husserl also calls ‘personalities of a higher order’ (Personalitäten höherer Ordnung), e.g. social institutions that can act in the manner of persons.Footnote ⁸² As he puts it: ‘Living is always living as human beings in the horizon of co-humanity’ (Leben ist immerzu Leben als Menschen mit dem Horizont der Mitmenschlichkeit).Footnote ⁸³