Eidetic psychology and theory of knowledge in Logical Investigations by Husserl⁶

Abstract

In Logical Investigations, published by Husserl in 1900/1901, the phenomenology is understood as a peculiar form of descriptive psychology, elaborated to serve as a foundation for the theory of knowledge. The peculiarity of this descriptive psychology is that it would be able to achieve a priori knowledge on the psyche. In this article, we try to show, in contrast to the classical empiricism of the 16th and 17th century and the Kant’s transcendental idealism, the peculiarity of the psychological method in Logical Investigations, as well as the reasons by which this method was founded as the basis for the theory of knowledge.

Keywords:
Husserl; phenomenology; eidetic psychology; descriptive psychology

Resumo

Nas Investigações lógicas, publicadas por Husserl em 1900/1901, a fenomenologia é entendida como uma forma peculiar de psicologia descritiva, elaborada a fim de servir de fundamento da teoria do conhecimento. A peculiaridade dessa psicologia descritiva é que ela seria capaz de alcançar conhecimentos a priori sobre a psique. Neste artigo, procuramos mostrar, em contraste com o empirismo clássico dos séculos XVI e XVII e o idealismo transcendental kantiano, a peculiaridade do método psicológico presente nas Investigações lógicas, bem como o sentido pelo qual esse método foi posto como fundamento da teoria do conhecimento.

Palavras-chave:
Husserl; fenomenologia; psicologia eidética; psicologia descritiva

Résumé

En Recherches logiques, publiés par Husserl en 1900/1901, la phénoménologie est comprise comme une forme particulière de la psychologie descriptive, mis au point pour servir de base pour la théorie de la connaissance. La particularité de cette psychologie descriptive est qu’il serait en mesure d’atteindre une connaissance a priori sur le psychisme. Nous avons essayé de montrer, en contraste avec l’empirisme classique du XVIe et XVIIe siècles et l’idéalisme transcendantal de Kant, la particularité de cette méthode psychologique présent dans les Recherches logiques et le sens dans lequel cette méthode a été mise comme le fondement de la théorie de la connaissance.

Mots-clés:
Husserl; la phénoménologie; la psychologie eidétique; psychologie descriptive

Resumen

En Investigaciones lógicas, de Husserl publicada en 1900/1901, se entiende la fenomenología como una forma peculiar de la psicología descriptiva, desarrollada para servir como base en la teoría del conocimiento. La peculiaridad de esta psicología descriptiva es que sería capaz de lograr un conocimiento a priori sobre la psique. En este texto se pretende mostrar, en contraste con el empirismo clásico de los siglos XVI y XVII y el idealismo trascendental de Kant, la peculiaridad de este método psicológico en esta obra y el sentido en que este método fue puesto como fundamento de la teoría del conocimiento.

Palabras clave:
Husserl; fenomenología; psicología eidética; psicología descriptiva

Introduction

Logical investigations is one of the most important works of phenomenological tradition, established in the 20^th century. It is a work of rupture, because Husserl details, for the first time, the phenomenological method of analysis of the essences of psychic experiences, while distancing himself, in certain key points, from his master Brentano (Peres, 2014). Even today, the book is cited and praised, especially due to its critique of psychologism and for the accuracy of its psychological analysis.

The book has two editions. The first edition appeared in two volumes in 1900 and 1901. The second edition, which is more familiar to the public, appeared in 1913. In the second edition, Husserl made an extensive review of his first work. His objective was to harmonize it with his new discoveries, specially, with his method of the transcendental reduction⁷, which is covered in detail in his second great work, also from 1913, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. In this work, Husserl wanted to show that the phenomenology, once conducted from the transcendental reduction method, should be understood not as a form of psychology, but rather as a form of transcendental philosophy. Namely, in 1913, Husserl starts to argue that epistemology should be founded on transcendental or pure phenomenology. Although pure phenomenology was an analysis of the structures of consciousness, it should not be taken as a form of psychology (Husserl, 1911/1965). Psychology (of essences or facts) is always build in a naïf concept of reality and, as consequence, it is not able to found the epistemology with the necessary radicalism.

Naturally, the transcendental turn of phenomenology, which began around 1906/1907, generated a problem for Husserl. After all, how can one characterize the phenomenology of Logical Investigations, once he did not employ transcendental reduction in this book? However, Husserl knew the value of Logical Investigations, a works containing more than a thousand pages of dense philosophical analyses, which cost him almost a decade of hard work. Furthermore, Logical Investigations were responsible for having launched him into a prominent position in the German academic field, and it served as an inspiration not only to philosophers, but also for psychologists (Kusch, 1995). However, in 1913, Husserl had to face the following problem: Should the method employed in Logical Investigations still be understood as a psychological method? How can one characterize the method that he employed in this work? His latter solution was to separate the phenomenology into two parts: a phenomenological psychology, which should be considered a form of descriptive and a priori psychology (or eidetic psychology) and a pure phenomenology (or transcendental phenomenology) (Kockelmans, 1994). From 1917 onward, (Husserl, 1917/1987; 1997) would argue that there is a parallelism between these two disciplines, so that the results of one may be transposed, with some adjustments, to the other. This is the reason why Husserl continued perceiving the phenomenology from Logical Investigations as a form of psychology, although eidetic (1925/1962).

In this article, I will limit myself to the first edition of Logical Investigations, because my aim is to cover some of the systematic requirements, as well as the historical sense, that led Husserl to understand phenomenology as a form of descriptive and a prior psychology. The axis of the analyses will be the relationship between the theory of subjectivity and theory of knowledge. I chose the first edition because it clearly presents the context that leads Husserl to the phenomenology as a kind psychological method. Furthermore, by focusing on the first edition, we can observe the genetic development of the author’s thought, without submerging into the sea of complications that arise with the introduction of the transcendental reduction and the reviews operated in the second edition.

The first volume, published in 1900, Prolegomena to Pure Logic, caused a profound impact at the time. In this volume Husserl was committed to: (i) defending that logic was an autonomous theoretical science, a priori, of laws and ideal objects and not of experiences; (ii) arguing that any attempt to reduce logic to psychology incurred in relativism; and (iii) submitting the guidelines for the realization of pure logic (from which syllogistic would be one of its branches). The second part of the volume, published in 1901, was titled Investigations about the Phenomenology and Theory Knowledge. This second volume was divided into six investigations, each one dedicated to a separate, although complementary theme.

In this second volume, what caught the attention of his contemporaries, especially the psychologists, were the meticulous analyses of intentionality, conducted especially in the fifth and sixth investigation. Even though these analyses clearly provided a valuable contribution to psychology, it should be noted that, as the title of the second part suggests, the volume contains more than a psychological analysis. Psychology was not the end, but the means. The primary interest of Husserl was not to contribute to the body of knowledge of psychology, but rather to employ the psychological method for the elucidation of epistemological problems (Husserl, 1925/1962). In a few words, the full elucidation of the problem “What is knowledge?” demands the question “What is the experiences of knowing?”. Once a lived experience is a psychological process, then there is a clear link between theory of knowledge and psychology. Now we have the decisive question: Which psychological method is most appropriate for this task? Inspire by Brentano, Husserl’s answer is: a kind of inner-descriptive analysis of lived experiences, namely, descriptive psychology, in short, phenomenology.

As Husserl says in the preface of the second volume, his goal was to present a new theory of knowledge: “Phenomenology is, essentially, a descriptive psychology. As a result, the critique of knowledge is essentially psychology, or at least something that can only build in the field of psychology” (1901/1984, p. 23).⁸ Therefore, the sense of the psychological method can only be properly clarified by the reconstruction of the epistemological problem faced by Husserl, which requires a series of conceptual distinctions to be conducted, in addition to an analysis of the philosophical context of the time.

It is true that there were other authors in the philosophical tradition, especially in the modernity, that sought the foundation of epistemology in psychology. But there is something new in Husserl. His theory of knowledge does not rely on the empirical psychology, but in a form of intentional descriptive psychology, capable of reaching a priori knowledge. If, over the course of intellectual history, the various proposals of a psychological foundation of theory of knowledge have always incurred in aporias and problems, such as solipsism and relativism, that occurred, per Husserl, because they sustained themselves in a misconception of subjectivity, a concept that does not consider its most fundamental trait, intentionality (Husserl, 1925/1962). What Husserl calls psychologism in the Prolegomena is no other thing than a bad foundation of logic, a foundation that rests in some kind of empirical psychology, and, as consequence, always leads to relativism.

On the other hand, there is an essential link between Theory of Knowledge and a Theory of Subjectivity. And Husserl proposes a a new theory of knowledge, built on a basis of an adequate description of the structure of the various types of experiences, i.e., those experiences that are characterized by being conscious of something (Husserl, 1901/1984).

In short, the phenomenology of Logical Investigations can be understood as a non-psychologist psychology directed towards solving problems of the theory of knowledge. For this reason, his phenomenology must be contextualized in the light of the critique of psychologism, on the one hand, and the epistemology, on the other. However, such coordination is easier to be indicated than performed. In order to observe this double link, we initially see the relationship between psychology and theory of knowledge, situating the thought of Husserl in a broader context of the history of philosophy. Later, we will observe the link between psychology and logic.

Psychology and theory of knowledge

According to (Husserl, 1927/1997; 1925/1962), from Descartes up to the end of the 19^th century, there are two principles that remain presupposed by the vast majority of philosophers: (i) the conception of the theory of knowledge must be founded on a science of subjectivity. That is, anyone who wants to understand what knowledge is and how it is produced must focus on the cognitive operations of the mind, or, more particularly, of human understanding. (ii) Human subjects have no immediate access to such things as they are in themselves, i.e., the human subject has direct access only to his/her own representations. This last principle could be called “principle of immanence” or the “principle of subjectivity” (Porta, 2013). As we will see, Husserl partially accepts the first thesis and rejects the second.

These two theses are both present in the empiricist tradition and the transcendental idealism of Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that the human being only has immediate access to phenomena (which are understood as representations of consciousness) and every attempt to achieve a thing in itself (Ding an sich) is speculative metaphysics. However, Husserl calls attention to an important difference between Kant and the main authors of empiricism (1976). The difference concerns the approach of subjectivity or conscience⁹. Empiricists tried to understand the knowledge by describing the subjectivity itself (1925/1962). For the empiricist tradition, the concept of inner perception (reflection or inner sense) is central. Locke, for example, is an exemplary case. In the first chapter of book II of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the English philosopher advocates that there are two and only two sources of knowledge about the facts: the inner sense and the external sense. While the external sense is a source of knowledge of external objects, the inner sense or reflection is a source of knowledge of the operations of the interior life (Locke, 1690/1975). Hence, for Locke, to carry out a theory of knowledge free from metaphysical speculation, it is necessary to rely exclusively on empirical data obtained by inner perception. Only through reflection can one establishes the laws that explain (i) how ideas are formed (representations) based on sense data and (ii) how the ideas relate to each other (association, resemblance, contiguity, etc.).

Kant, as we know, rejects the empiricist thesis that the theory of knowledge must be based on experience, that is, data obtained by the inner sense. The problem of an empirical approach to subjectivity is that every empirical science of facts is not able to reach knowledge in the strong sense of the word, that is, universal and necessary knowledge. Empiricism, especially after Hume, only accepts two classes of possible knowledge, which Hume called, in section IV of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “matters of fact” and “relations of ideas” (Hume, 1748/2007). This differentiation appears in (Kant, 1787/2010) as a difference between synthetic a posteriori judgments and a priori analytical judgments. The first class of judgments is never necessary; the second class, despite having the character of necessity (for example, “every single is not married”), consists only in the analysis of meanings and so does not provide any new information.

In this background, one of the main problems of the Critique of pure Reason is to achieve a necessary and universal, yet non-analytic, knowledge about subjectivity. In other words, Kant must find a way to reach a priori science of human understanding. This “science” is what Kant referred to as transcendental philosophy. “I name as transcendental all cognition that deals not so much with objects, but rather with our way of cognizing what is to be a priori possible” (Kant, 1787/2010, p. 53). It is clear that this science of subjectivity cannot be founded on experience, because the latter only gives possible knowledge.

But why does Kant see the necessity of an a priori science of subjectivity? The reason is that he intends to support the universality and necessity of sciences (especially geometry, Newtonian physics, and arithmetic) in the a priori structures of subjectivity. The famous Copernican revolution is to stablishes subjectivity as the ultimate source of the necessity of the principles of science. The possibility of synthetic a priori principles in sciences, such as the causal principle, depends on the presence of universal and necessary structures in the subject. Experiences alone cannot give us necessary knowledge. Therefore, it is not by chance that Kant rejects experience, reflection in special, as the foundation of the theory of knowledge.

However, Kant does not reject the thesis that the theory of knowledge must be founded on a theory of subjectivity. Kant’s problem is to raise a non-empirical theory of subjectivity. His solution lies in transcendental deduction. Kant offers not an empirical theory of subjectivity, but rather a transcendental one. A transcendental theory does not investigate what is given in experience, nor that which is beyond experience, but what is before experience, i.e., what enables experience. Kant reaches the categories of understanding and forms of sensitivity not by an inner description his experiences, but rather by a regressive, constructive and deductive process, which is called by Husserl “regressive method” (1936/1976). The Kantian transcendental subject is not subjectivity as described by the subject, but a principle of logical and epistemological foundation. In other words, the categories of understanding and forms of sensibility are, for Kant, conditions without which the synthetic a priori knowledge about the phenomena would not be possible. Such categories do not come from experience, since they are those that make the experience possible. The experience only gives us objects. The subjective conditions are not objects at all, and therefore cannot be given in experience. The argument works for the method of reflection, which is found in inner sense. There are conditions without which the inner sense would not be possible, for example, the form of time.

Husserl’s project, as we will see, leis in a kind of middle term between the empirical and Kantian conception of subjectivity. We must emphasize, however, that Husserl does not reach a simple “middle ground” between these two currents of thought. Husserl seeks to accomplish something that would have haunted both classic empiricists and Kant. On the one hand, he wants to erect phenomenology from data obtained through inner perception, but, on the other hand, he seeks to achieve, as Kant did, a priori knowledge regarding the subjectivity, that is, universal and necessary knowledge. What we should examine carefully is how he intends to do it and what Husserl means by a priori.

For Husserl, a priori knowledge is knowledge of essences (eidos). Hence, a priori sciences (including pure logic) are sciences of essences (1925/1962, p. 39). Husserl’s solution to accomplish a descriptive a priori psychology is not relying exclusively in the inner perception, but in eidetic intuition operated from data obtained from the inner perception. The eidetic intuition, the vision of essence (Wesensschau), can be understood, in the broadest sense of word, as a kind of experience.

Let’s take the following proposition “all valuation experience requires necessarily an experience of presentation (Vorstellung) of something.”¹⁰ It is a universal and necessary judgment. It is impossible for me to evaluate something as being good or useful without having an experience of presentation in that something. This law is valid for any valuation act, no matter what it is. The valuation act is not the act of presentation, since it is possible to have an act of presentation without having an act of valuation. We observe that the eidetic law does not establish a relationship of coexistence and succession among facts, such as, for example, “where there is smoke, there is fire” or “what goes up must come down.” It is conceivable that there is smoke where there is no fire, just as it is conceivable that something can go up and not come down. On the other hand, the relationship that exists between the experience of valuing and the experience of presentation is not discovered by induction. It is not the result of a generalization. It is impossible for an experience of valuing to exist without an experience of presentation (just as it is impossible for a sound without a crest). This is an a priori law, a law that expresses a necessary relationship between different types of experiences (in this case, the experience of valuing and the experience of presenting).

Each class of experiences, such as knowing, remembering, fantasizing and meaning have its own kind of structure. Therefore, eidetic psychology must: (i) classify the types of experiences, (ii) conceptually fix the essential structure of each type of experience, (iii) clarify the essential relationships between the different types of experiences, and (iv) clarify the forms of relationships between the experiences and other entities (the body itself, the world, culture, etc.). The structure of sensitive perceptual experiences is different from affective experiences, which, in turn, is different from that of remembering experiences or linguistic experiences, etc. Thus, Husserl sometimes says that phenomenology restores the old idea presented in Wolf (1679-1754) of an a priori psychology, albeit purged of metaphysical reminiscences (Husserl, 1925/1962).

Husserl opposes fact and essence. Every fact is a unique, unrepeatable event and is subject to time. Essence, on the other hand, is something ideal and can be exemplified in several facts. That is, several real e so different facts may have the same ideal essence. Two experiences of perception (taken in their factuality) are never identical; however, the essence of perception is always the same. With the distinction between fact and essence, Husserl distinguished the psychology of facts (or empirical psychology) and psychology of essences. At this point, there is much misunderstanding present in the Husserlian literature. Firstly, it is not true that Husserl rejects the psychology of facts (empirical psychology). What he rejects is any project of empirical psychology that violates the laws of essences obtained by eidetic psychology and, particularly in Prolegomena, any project that aims to found logic in empirical psychology (Husserl, 1911/1984).

There are several problems regarding the idea of founding logic in an empirical science. For Husserl, logic is an a priori science, that is, a universal and necessary science, whereas empirical psychology is, at best, a contingent science able to obtain probable knowledge. It is impossible to found an a priori science in a contingent science (possible) (Husserl, 1900/1975). However, the impossibility of founding necessary laws in contingent laws does not imply abandoning the project to founding logic in a theory of subjectivity. On the contrary, it is an important task founding logic in an essential analysis of logical experiences. Founding, in this context, does not mean to deduce logic from psychology, mas clarify the relationship between logic and subjectivity. In Logical Investigations, Husserl believed that only eidetic psychology can achieve this task, insofar it is a science able to achieve necessary laws regarding the psychic life (1925/1962).

In summary, although the phenomenology has the experience and, in particular, inner perception as its starting point, it is not a form of “psychology of facts” or “empirical psychology.” While empiricism seeks to find laws of coexistence and succession of psychological facts, Husserl seeks to examine not the fact itself or the contingent relations among the facts, but rather the essence inherent to these facts, as well as their essential relationships. Eidetic psychology limits itself to takes a fact as an exemplary of an essence. The psychic fact, obtained by inner perception, is nothing more than the initial route of access to the essence, grabbed by eidetic intuition.

Ideality and reality

In the light of the previous discussion, we can now affirm that Husserl, in Logical investigations, remains, to some extent, stuck to the tradition of seeking the foundation of the theory of knowledge in a science of subjectivity. But this is only true to a certain extent, because this subjective direction of the research consists of half of the task. To understand what knowledge is, we need another direction of research that is complementary, whose task is to establish the conditions of objective possibility (or logic) of knowledge, which are based on the objective-ideal content of knowledge.

Husserl distinguishes the noetic from the objective conditions of possibility of knowledge. The noetic conditions lie in the subject. They concern the conditions that any knowing subject must have to achieve knowledge. For this reason, these conditions do not regard to the empirical peculiarity of human knowledge as being psychologically conditioned; For the other hand, we have purely logical conditions, i.e., based solely on the laws in which knowledge rests (Husserl, 1900/1975). Noetic conditions concern the structure of knowing lived experiences, whereas the logic conditions concern the logical content of the knowing experiences.

It is true that we cannot really separate the objective content and the experience of knowledge, as we cannot really separate the tone and the sound. However, although inseparable, they are distinguishable. Two or more experiences of knowledge may have the same objective content. Each experience of knowledge that occurs in the stream of consciousness is always a unique experience, distinct from other experiences. Husserl, in Logical Investigations, understands that every experience is a real factual psychic event and every real factual event is unique and unrepeatable (1901/1984). An experience never repeats itself identically. Two or more people cannot have the same exact experiences. However, the objective content, as it is not a real integral part of experience, can be repeated and shared among various subjects.

This distinction, between the experience of knowledge and its objective content plays an crucial role in Logical Investigations. It is precisely this distinction that delimits the field of phenomenology from the field of logic. Phenomenology deals with lived experiences and, particularly, with the experiences of knowledge, while pure logic deals with the formal structures of the objective-ideal content of theoretical knowledge. For Husserl, science is not the sum of all experiences (or acts) of knowledge:

We understand a theory as a certain ideal content of possible knowledge and, exactly in the same way, we understand the truth, the law, etc... . theory is not built on acts, but rather on purely ideal elements, of truth, and in purely ideal ways, in the forms of foundation and consequence. (Husserl, 1900/1975/p. 179)

A scientific theory is an ideal objective unit that becomes accessible to many individuals by language: “science exists objectively only in its literature, only in written work does it have a rich relational being ... in this form, it is propagated down the millennia and survives individuals, generations and nations.” (Husserl, 1900/1975, p. 28). The linguistic signs, therefore, do not transmit experiences, but rather ideal contents. We can say that science, for Husserl, is a systematic theoretical set of objective ideal meanings that deals with a given field of objects. The task of pure logic is to investigate the necessary structures that belong to every possible theory, i.e., the objective ideal conditions without which a theory could not exist, such as the principle of contradiction. If pure logic investigates the essence of ideal objective structures (meanings, theories, proposals, etc.), then phenomenology (as presented in Logical Investigations), on the other hand, studies the essence of real experiences, belonging to the stream of consciousness.

The key of Logical Investigations is that, for Husserl, there is a correlation between logic and phenomenology. “Despite only the ideal analysis and not the phenomenological analysis originally belonging to pure logic, the latter cannot be dismissed. Because all that belongs to the logical order should have its subjective realization” (Husserl, 1901/1984, p. 4). There is a correlation between the objective-ideal-logical content and the logical experience. That is the correlation that we should now examine.

Ideality and subjectivity

The thesis of the objective validity of logical-ideal entities such as propositions, truths, theories, requires a conception of subjectivity distinct from that which is present in empiricism, either the classical empiricism of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, or that developed in the 19^th century by (Mill, 1900/1975). For Husserl, empiricism, by denying the validity of ideal entities and reducing the knowledge to psychic facts, must be abandoned, once it inevitably leads to skepticism and relativism (1900/1975). The empiricist conception of subjectivity is not only blind to ideality, but is also incompatible with them. But if Husserl shows that the assumptions present in empiricism violates the objective conditions of knowledge, this does not imply abandoning the idea that epistemology requires a theory of subjectivity. On the contrary, the thesis of objectivity of logical entities requires a certain conception of subjectivity, in which the psychological subject is able to access them. Therefore, the objective conditions of theoretical knowledge imply subjective conditions. One of these conditions is the intentionality of consciousness. Consciousness is not a closed box. It is not true that consciousness can only grasp what is found inside itself, i.e. its subjective content. If this were the case, the apprehension of ideal entities (not psychic and objective) would be impossible. And, in fact, Husserl dedicated to show that the most part of experiences that make up the stream of consciousness are intentional, as they direct to objects that transcend the stream of consciousness (Husserl, 1901/1984). If I am aware of a table, the experience of perception is subjective, it belongs to a stream-of-consciousness, but the intentional object, the table, is not subjective. The table is something that transcends the real content of experience. Similarly, if I am aware of a theorem, the object of my consciousness is the theorem itself, and not my experience of representing the theorem.

As we have seen, the acceptance of ideal entities implies accepting an intentional theory of subjectivity. However, for Husserl, it is not enough to postulate noetic (or subjective) conditions of knowledge, such as intentionality and the ability to see the truth (evidence). It is not sufficient to assert, in a purely argumentative way, that such conditions must effectively exist in the subject, because otherwise we would have, as consequence, the impossibility of knowledge. It is necessary to complement this argument based on the consequences with a descriptive explanation of noetic conditions of knowledge (1901/1984). The theory of knowledge must not just “build” a conception of subjectivity that can substantiate the objectivity of knowledge, but also legitimize it from evidence. Once this final task is a requirement, a psychology founded on inner vision (reflection) is required. Empiricism was right to refuse the dogmatic postulation of a transcendental subject as being inaccessible to experience and to defend the faithful description of subjectivity. The problem of empiricism is that it, due to naturalistic prejudices, described human consciousness badly (1931/1991; 1936/1976). It was blind to the intentionality of consciousness and, in particular, to the experiences in which the essences are captured.

The only way to understand how a subject is able to know is by using a new psychology, which is descriptive, intentional, a priori, and based on reflection. (Husserl, 1901/1984). With this, phenomenology becomes, first of all, a study of correlations between the structures of consciousness and the structures of the object (or objectivity). There is a correlation between linguistic signs and significant (or symbolic) experiences (Husserl, 1901/1984) between names and nominal experiences, between propositions and categorial experiences.

This situation can also be expressed as follows: to know a thing, it is necessary to know its ways of donation. And to understand the ways something manifests itself we should step back to consciousness. The condition for the object manifests itself leis not in itself but in conscious. Every phenomenon is a phenomenon of something for someone. And each kind of object has its own way of manifestation, and as consequence. What is the difference between being aware of a theorem, a computer, a state of affairs, a concept, or a judicative experience? What is the difference between being aware of a table, seeing it, and being aware of the same table, without seeing it? According to Husserl, there are structural differences among the various forms of consciousness. And each form of intention experience has, as correlate, different kind of objects. The structure of experience in which a theorem is apprehend different from an experience in which the feeling of others is apprehend.

It is necessary to emphasize that Husserl is not interested in establishing the factual conditions for knowledge, such as, for example, to have the frontal cortex developed, etc. What he is interested in is establishing the essential conditions, i.e., those conditions without which the scientific-theoretical knowledge would be inconceivable. What Husserl seeks, therefore, are conditions for a possibility of knowledge that is valid not only for humans, but also for any being endowed with consciousness, no matter if it is an alien or an angel (Husserl, 1900/1975). If an angel exists and possess theoretical knowledge, then the angel’s consciousness, in order to apprehend theoretical structures of truths, should necessarily be able to perform certain classes of experiences, such as symbolic, linguistic and intuitive experiences (categorical and sensitive).

Final considerations

Husserl’s main objective, in Logical investigations, was to employ phenomenology in solving epistemological problems. Motivated by epistemological problems, he stablishes the bases for a descriptive and a priori psychology of the experiences. On this occasion, eidetic psychology was employed to examine and legitimize the subjective conditions of possibility of knowledge descriptively, including the intentionality of consciousness and, in particular, the experiences of meaning (in its various forms), perception (in its various forms), and knowledge.

In elaborating a detailed analysis of the experiences through which theoretical knowledge becomes a possession of the subject, Husserl does not only operate an argumentative critique of the empiricist conception of subjectivity, but also a descriptive one.

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• Peres, S. P. (2014). O problema da transcendência do objeto da percepção e do objeto da física nas Investigações Lógicas de Husserl. Philósophos, 19(1), 219-246.
• Porta, M. A. G. (2013). Edmund Husserl: psicologismo, psicologia e fenomenologia. São Paulo, SP: Loyola.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jan-Apr 2017

History

• Received
  18 Mar 2015
• Reviewed
  23 Nov 2015
• Accepted
  22 Dec 2015