## 1. Life and work



Husserl was born in Prossnitz (Moravia) on April 8th, 1859.
His parents were non-orthodox Jews; Husserl himself and his wife would
later convert to Protestantism. They had three children, one of whom
died in World War I. In the years 1876-78 Husserl studied
astronomy in Leipzig, where he also attended courses of lectures in
mathematics, physics and philosophy. Among other things, he heard
Wilhelm Wundt's lectures on philosophy. (Wundt was the
originator of the first institute for experimental psychology.)
Husserl's mentor was Thomas Masaryk, a former student of
Brentano's, who was later to become the first president of
Czechoslovakia. In 1878-81 Husserl continued his studies in
mathematics, physics and philosophy in Berlin. His mathematics
teachers there included Leopold Kronecker and Karl Weierstrass, whose
scientific ethos Husserl was particularly impressed with. However, he
took his PhD in mathematics in Vienna (January 1883), with a thesis on
the theory of variations (*Variationstheorie*). After that he
returned to Berlin, to become Weierstrass' assistant. When
Weierstrass got seriously ill, Masaryk suggested that Husserl go back
to Vienna, to study philosophy with Franz Brentano, the author of
*Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint* (1874). After a brief
military service in Vienna, Husserl followed Masaryk's advice
and studied with Brentano from 1884-86. Brentano's
lectures on psychology and logic had a lasting impact on Husserl, as
had his general vision of a strictly scientific philosophy. Brentano
then recommended Husserl to his pupil Carl Stumpf in Halle, who is
perhaps best known for his *Psychology of Tone* (two volumes,
1883/90). This recommendation enabled Husserl to prepare and submit
his habilitation dissertation *On the Concept of Number* (1887)
with Stumpf.



That thesis was later integrated into Husserl's first published
monograph, *Philosophy of Arithmetic*, which appeared in 1891.
In this work, Husserl combined his mathematical, psychological and
philosophical competencies to attempt a psychological foundation of
arithmetic (see Willard 1984, pp. 38-118; Bell 1990, pp.
31-84). The book was, however, criticized for its underlying
psychologism in a review by Gottlob Frege. It seems that Husserl took
that criticism very seriously (see Follesdal 1958), although it
is far from clear that the author of *Philosophy of Arithmetic*
regards logic as a branch of psychology, as "strong
psychologism" (Mohanty 1982, p. 20) has it. In any case, Husserl
sharply attacked that kind of psychologism (raising about eighteen
objections in total; see Soldati 1994, pp. 117 ff) and developed the
philosophical method he is nowadays famous for: phenomenology.



In 1900/01 his first phenomenological work was published in two
volumes, titled *Logical Investigations*. The first volume
contains a forceful attack against psychologism, whereas the (much
larger) second volume consists of six
"descriptive-psychological" and
"epistemological" investigations into (I) expression and
meaning, (II) universals, (III) the formal ontology of parts and
wholes (mereology), (IV) the "syntactical" and
mereological structure of meaning, (V) the nature and structure of
intentionality as well as (VI) the interrelation of truth, intuition
and cognition. Husserl now adheres to a version of platonism that he
derived from ideas of Hermann Lotze and especially Bernard Bolzano,
where he embeds platonism about meaning and mental content in a theory
of intentional consciousness (see Beyer 1996).



In the first decade of the 20th century, Husserl
considerably refined and modified his method into what he called
"transcendental phenomenology". This method has us focus
on the essential structures that allow the objects naively taken for
granted in the "natural attitude" (which is characteristic
of both our everyday life and ordinary science) to "constitute
themselves" in consciousness. (Among those who influenced him in
this regard are Descartes, Hume and Kant.) As Husserl explains in
detail in his second major work, *Ideas* (1913), the resulting
perspective on the realm of intentional consciousness is supposed to
enable the phenomenologist to develop a radically unprejudiced
justification of his (or her) basic views on the world and himself and
explore their rational interconnections.



Husserl developed these ideas in Gottingen, where--thanks to
his *Logical Investigations* and the support by Wilhelm
Dilthey, who admired that work and recommended Husserl to the Prussian
ministry of culture--he received an associate professorship
("Extraordinariat", later turned into a
"Personliches Ordinariat") in 1901. From 1910/11 and
1913, respectively, he served as founding (co-)editor of
*Logos* (in the first issue of which his programmatic article
"Philosophy as a Rigorous Science" appeared, containing a
critique of naturalism) and of the *Yearbook for Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Research* (opening with his *Ideas Pertaining
to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy*).
Husserl stayed in Gottingen until 1916. It is here that he made
his most important philosophical discoveries (cf. Mohanty 1995), such
as the transcendental-phenomenological method, the phenomenological
structure of time-consciousness, the fundamental role of the notion of
intersubjectivity in our conceptual system, the horizon-structure of
our singular empirical thought, and more. In later works--most
notably in *On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time* (1928), *Formal and Transcendental Logic* (1929),
*Cartesian Meditations* (1931), *The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology* (1954) and
*Experience and Judgement* (1939)--these results were
developed further and put into new contexts, such as the path-breaking
project of linking the basic notions of science back to their
conceptual roots in the pre-scientific (regions of the)
"lifeworld" (*Crisis*).



In the year 1916 Husserl became Heinrich Rickert's successor as
full professor ("Ordinarius") in Freiburg/Breisgau, where
(among many other things) he worked on passive synthesis (cf.
*Husserliana*, vol. XI, XXXI). He gave four lectures on
*Phenomenological Method and Phenomenological Philosophy* at
University College, London, in 1922 (cf. *Husserliana*, vol.
XXXV). In 1923 he received a call to Berlin, which he rejected.
Husserl retired in 1928, his successor being his (and Rickert's)
former assistant Martin Heidegger (whose major work *Being and
Time* had been published in Husserl's *Yearbook* in
1927). In 1929 he accepted an invitation to Paris. His lectures there
were published as *Cartesian Meditations* in 1931. In the same
year, Husserl gave a number of talks on "Phenomenology and
Anthropology", in which he criticized his two
"antipodes", Heidegger and Max Scheler (cf. Husserl 1997).
In 1933 Hitler took over in Germany. Husserl received a call to Los
Angeles but rejected. Because of his Jewish ancestors, he became more
and more humiliated and isolated. In 1935 he gave a series of invited
lectures in Prague, resulting in his last major work, *The Crisis
of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology*.



Edmund Husserl died on April 27, 1938 in Freiburg. His manuscripts
(more than 40000 pages in total) were rescued by the Franciscan Herman
Leo Van Breda, who brought them to Leuven (Belgium), where the first
Husserl archive was founded in 1939. (Today, there are further
archives in Freiburg, Cologne, Paris, New York and Pittsburgh.) Since
1950 the Husserl archives are editing Husserl's collected works,
*Husserliana.*


## 2. Pure logic, meaning, intuitive fulfillment and intentionality



As a philosopher with a mathematical background, Husserl was
interested in developing a general theory of inferential systems,
which (following Bolzano) he conceived of as a theory of science, on
the ground that every science (including mathematics) can be looked
upon as a system of propositions that are interconnected by a set of
inferential and grounding relations. Following John S. Mill, he argues
in *Logical Investigations* that the best way to study the
nature of such propositional systems is to start with their linguistic
manifestations, i.e., (sets of) sentences and (assertive) utterances
thereof.



How are we to analyse these sentences and the propositions they
express? Husserl's approach is to study the units of
consciousness that the respective speaker presents himself as
having--that he "gives voice to"--in expressing
the proposition in question (for instance, while writing a
mathematical textbook or giving a lecture). These units of
consciousness he labels *intentional acts* or *intentional
experiences*, since they always represent something as
something--thus exhibiting what Brentano called intentionality.
According to Husserl, there are non-intentional units of consciousness
as well. (He quotes pain as an example.) What distinguishes
intentional from non-intentional experiences is the former's
having intentional content.



Even objectless (i.e., empty) intentional experiences like your
thought of the winged horse Pegasus have content. On Husserl's
view, that thought simply lacks a corresponding object; the
intentional act is "merely as of", but not really of, an
object. Husserl rejects "representationalist" accounts of
intentionality, such as the mental image theory, according to which
intentional experiences represent intra-mental pictorial
representations of objects, where like other pictures such images may
exist without there being a depicted object in the actual world. For
Husserl, this view leads to a "false duplication" of
objects represented in the veridical case; and it already presupposes
what an adequate conception of pictorial representation is yet to
accomplish: an explanation of what it is that makes the underlying
"phantasy content", or phantasm, "the [r]epresenting
image *of* something or other" (Husserl 1994, p. 347;
*Husserliana*, vol. XXII, pp. 305f). It is precisely an
intentional content that does the trick here (as in all cases of
intentional consciousness), according to Husserl, in a way to be
explained in more detail by his phenomenology of consciousness.



In the case of propositional acts, i.e., units of consciousness that
can be given voice to by a complete sentence (paradigmatically, a
declarative sentence), Husserl identifies their content with the
propositional meaning expressed by that sentence. In the case of their
non-propositional but still intentional parts, he identifies the
corresponding intentional content with a sub-propositional meaning.
For example, the judgement "Napoleon is a Frenchman"
contains an act of thinking of Napoleon whose intentional content is
the sub-propositional meaning expressed by the name
"Napoleon". (Accordingly, the judgement can be looked upon
as an act of ascribing the property of being French to the referent of
that name.) Experiences like this, which can be given voice to by
either a singular or a general term, are called "nominal
acts" (as opposed to the propositional acts containing them).
Their contents are called "nominal meanings".



Husserl regards both propositional and nominal meanings as the
subject-matter of "pure logic" or "logic in the wide
sense"--the study of (i) what distinguishes sense (alias
meaning) from nonsense (this part of pure logic being called
"pure grammar") and (ii) which of the senses delivered by
pure grammar are logically consistent and which of them are not (this
part of pure logic being labelled "logic in the narrow
sense").



An important and still largely unexplored claim of Husserl's is
that any logically consistent meaning can in principle be subjectively
fulfilled, more or less adequately, by a unified intuition, such as an
act of continuous perception or intuitive imagination, where the
structure and other essential features of the meaning in question can
be read off from the respective mode of intuitive fulfillment.
Inconsistent meanings can be singled out and studied by means of
(reflection upon) corresponding experiences of intuitive conflict,
like for instance the discrete switching back and forth between a
duck-head-imagination and a rabbit-head-imagination in the case of an
attempted intuitive imagination of a duck-head that is at the same
time a rabbit-head. Some meanings are inconsistent for formal-logical
reasons. According to Husserl, all analytically false propositions
belong to this category. Other meanings are inconsistent because they
conflict with some general material a priori truth, also called
"essential law". The proposition expressed by the sentence
"There are perceptual objects whose surface is both (visibly)
completely green and completely red at the same time" is a case
in point.



Meanings generally and propositions in particular exist independently
of their actually functioning as intentional content. Thus, true
propositions such as the Pythagorean theorem can be
*discovered*. Propositions and their components are abstract,
i.e., atemporal, objects. However, what does it mean to *grasp*
a proposition or, more generally, a sense? How can an abstract object
become the content of an intentional act? Combining ideas of Bolzano
and Lotze, Husserl answers this question by taking recourse to the
notion of an ideal (i.e., abstract) *species* or *type*,
as follows. Propositions and other meanings are ideal species that can
be (but do not have to be) instantiated by certain particular
features, i.e., dependent parts, of intentional acts. Those species
are also called "ideal matters". The particular features
instantiating an ideal matter--Husserl refers to them as
"moments of matter"--are laid bare by
phenomenological description, a reflection-based (or introspective)
analysis taking into account both the linguistic expression(s) (if
any) and the modes of (possible) intuitive fulfillment or conflict
associated with the respective experience.



Since phenomenological description yields ideal species, it involves
what Husserl was later (notably in *Ideas*) to call
"eidetic reduction", i.e., an unfolding of abstract
features shared by appropriate sets of fictitious or real-life
examples, by way, e.g., of free imaginative variation on an
arbitrarily chosen initial example (for the method of "free
variation", see *Experience and Judgement*, sec. 87).



Phenomenological description also yields the "moment of
quality" of the intentional experience under investigation,
i.e., the particular feature instantiating its psychological mode
(judgement, conscious deliberation, conscious desire, conscious hope,
etc.), which roughly corresponds to the speech act mode of an
utterance giving voice to that experience. Furthermore, the
description yields relations of "foundation", i.e.,
one-sided or mutual relative existential dependencies between (1) the
experience in question and other experiences and (2) the particular
descriptive features of the experience. Thus, an experience of
pleasure about a given event is one-sidedly founded, relative to the
stream of consciousness it belongs to, in a particular belief-state to
the effect that this event has occurred. (The relativization to a
particular stream of consciousness makes sure that both founded and
founding experience occur in the same person's mind.) Like all
foundation relations, this one holds in virtue of an essential law, to
the effect that conscious pleasure about some state of affairs
requires a corresponding (and simultaneous) belief. Quite generally, a
given object *a* of type *F* is founded in a particular
object *b* of type *G* (where *a* is different
from *b* and *F* is different from *G*) relative
to a particular whole *c* of type *H* if and only if (i)
there is an essential law in virtue of which it holds that for any
object *x* of type *F* there is an object *y* of
type *G* and a whole *z* of type *H*, such that
both *x* and *y* are (proper) parts of *z*, and
(ii) both *a* and *b* are (proper) parts of *c*.
Of course, the notion of an essential law needs further clarification
(see De Santis 2021, pt. III ff).


## 3. Indexicality and propositional content



However, as Husserl was well aware, the species-theory of content
faces at least one serious objection. This objection concerns
utterances that are "essentially occasional", i.e.,
systematically context-sensitive, expressions like "I am here
now" and the 'indexical' experiences they give voice
to. If the intentional content of an indexical experience is to serve
as a (sub-)propositional content, it must uniquely determine the
object (if any) that the respective experience refers to. That is to
say: if two indexical experiences display the same intentional
content, they must refer to the same object (if any). It seems,
though, that the moments of matter of two such experiences can
instantiate the same ideal matter--the same type of (particular)
content--whilst representing different objects. If you and I both
think "I am here", our respective thoughts share the same
type of content, or so it would seem, but they represent different
states of affairs. In order to accommodate this observation, Husserl
draws a distinction between, on the one hand, the "general
meaning function" of an utterance (which corresponds to what
David Kaplan calls "character", roughly: the linguistic
meaning of the expression used) and, on the other hand, the
"respective meaning" (i.e., the propositional or
sub-propositional content expressed in the relevant context of
utterance). However, it is doubtful whether this distinction really
helps Husserl overcome the difficulty the phenomenon of
context-sensitivity poses for his species-theory of content. If
intentional contents are ideal matters in the sense of *types*
of particular matters, and if this kind of type may remain constant
while the intentional object and hence the (sub-)propositional content
differs, then surely intentional contents thus conceived cannot always
function as (sub-)propositional contents, as Husserl's theory
would have it. Rather, there must be another intentional content
involved, namely the "respective meaning", which serves as
the (sub-)propositional content of the indexical experience. And this
content does not appear to be an ideal *species*. (It may be
argued, however, that even (sub-)propositional contents of indexical
utterances can be *instantiated multiply* in thought and
speech, thus qualifying as ideal species after all. But the crucial
question is whether this holds true in complete generality: consider
the above example "I am here now".)



However that may be, Husserl construes (sub-)propositional contents
("respective meanings") as two-factored, with the general
meaning function plus the relevant context of utterance (if any)
determining the content in question. And at least in the case of
indexical experiences he seems to identify their intentional contents
with these two-factored contents, for he holds that intentional
content, which is referred to as "noematic sense" or
"noematic nucleus" in *Ideas*, uniquely determines
reference, i.e., intentional object. (For the claim that noematic
sense is contextually determined respective meaning rather than
general meaning function--which rules out any internalist
reading; see Section 4 below--cf. *Husserliana*, vol.
XX/1, pp. 74-78; see also *Husserliana*, vol. XXVI, p.
212, fn.) Some scholars even go as far as to claim that Husserl
defines the noematic sense as "a certain person, object, event,
state of affairs which presents itself, taken exactly as it present
itself or as it is intended" (Gurwitsch 1982, pp. 61 f.; cp.
Sokolowski 1987 and Drummond 1992; for a much-discussed critique of
Gurwitsch's interpretation see Follesdal 1969). The
notion of an intentional object "as it is intended" is
already introduced in LI. It is argued (in LI V, sec. 20) that the
object (e.g. the situation of affairs) as it is intended is to be
distinguished from the (sub-)propositional content, on the grounds
that, for instance, the state of affairs judged (the situation of
affairs as it is categorically formed in the judgment) exists iff it
obtains (so that the judgment is true), whilst the propositional
content judged exists even if it is false (cf. *Husserliana*,
vol. XIX/1, 427).


## 4. Singularity, consciousness and horizon-intentionality



Husserl sees quite clearly that indexical experiences (just as
experiences given voice to by means of genuine proper names) are
characterized, among other things, by their *singularity*: they
represent a particular object, or set of objects, *x*, such
that *x* is to be regarded as the intentional object of the
respective experience in all relevant possible worlds (i.e., in all
actual or counterfactual circumstances relative to which we are
determining the object represented by that experience). Thus, for
instance, in sec. 47 of *Ideas*, he describes what an
experiencing subject, at a given time, in the light of his (or her)
current indexical experiences, considers to be "the actual
world" as a "special case" of a whole manifold of
"possible worlds" each of which corresponds to a possible
future course of experience (possible, that is, relative to the
indexical experience in question). These (actual or potential) future
experiences can be said to be (more or less) anticipated by the
experiencing subject at the respective time, and they constitute what
Husserl calls the "intentional horizon" of the indexical
experience in the light of whose intentional content they are
anticipated (cf. Smith and McIntyre 1982). For example, if you see
something as a table, you will expect it to appear to you in certain
ways if you go around and observe it.



What binds together the intentional horizon of a given indexical
experience? According to Husserl, all of the (actual or potential)
experiences constituting that horizon share a *sense of identity
through time*, which sense he labels as the *determinable
X* they belong to. As a first approximation, two experiences of a
given subject belong to the same determinable *X* if and only
if the subject believes them to represent the same object. (For a
related criterion of *inter*subjective identity of determinable
*X*, see Beyer 2000, sec. 7.) Hence, experiences belonging to a
determinable *X* must be accompanied by at least one
higher-order belief. This view fits in well with the thesis (shared,
at least in part, by so-called dispositional higher-order belief
theories of consciousness) that intentional experiences automatically
give rise to (i.e., motivate) momentary dispositions to make
corresponding reflective higher-order judgements, based on something
like inner perception, thus constituting a form of implicit or
"pre-reflective self-consciousness" (to use Sartre's
term).



It is controversial whether such a dispositional higher-order view may
be ascribed to Husserl (see Zahavi 2015, sec. 1; for a reply see Beyer
2018, sec. 1). It should be uncontroversial that on his view the
motivational basis of the relevant higher-order dispositional beliefs
must already display the essential feature of consciousness
independently of occurrent higher-order thought in order to be
available for such thought in the first place (see Beyer 2011, p. 44).
This becomes clear on a close study of Husserl's work on
"inner time-consciousness" (see the entry on
 phenomenological approaches to self-consciousness;
 also see Section 6 below). However, there is ample textual evidence
showing that he regards the availability to inner perception (in the
sense of a "real possibility" or "practical
ability"; see Section 8 below) and to accordingly motivated
reflective higher-order judgements (in which a hitherto "latent
Ego" becomes "patent") as an essential feature of
consciousness, constituting its "mode of being" (cf.
*Husserliana*, vol. III/1, p. 77, l. 27-35; p. 95, l.
36-38; *Husserliana*, vol. VIII, p. 90).



The determinable *X* a given indexical experience belongs to,
with respect to certain other experiences, helps us answer the
question of what determines the reference of that experience, if not
its ideal meaning species alone. In order to take the role played by
the determinable *X* into account properly, we have to employ a
Husserlian research strategy that could be called the *dynamic
method.* That is to say, we have to look upon intentional acts as
momentary components of certain transtemporal cognitive
structures--*dynamic intentional structures*--in
which one and the same object or state of affairs is represented
throughout a period of time during which the subject's cognitive
perspective upon that object or state of affairs is constantly
changing (see, e.g., *Ideas*, sec. 86). (Typical examples of
dynamic intentional structures include continuous
observations--which represent Husserl's standard
example--as well as those totalities of successive judgements, or
momentary belief-states, that actualize one and the same continuous
belief. For instance, my judgement that yesterday was Thursday
actualizes the same belief as the judgement I could have given voice
to yesterday by "Today is Thursday".) Consequently, the
determinable *X* is apt to lead us back through time towards
the original situation where the reference of the relevant unified
series of successive intentional horizons was fixed, like for instance
the occasion of the subject's first perceptual encounter with a
particular object: the corresponding perceptual experience will belong
to the same determinable *X* as all of the (remaining)
experiences belonging to the relevant series. In a more recent
terminology, one may say that in this perceptual situation the subject
has opened a mental file about a particular object (cf. Perry
1980).



In a research manuscript from 1913 Husserl refers to mental files
associated with proper names as "individual notions
(*Eigenbegriffe*)" (cf. *Husserliana*, vol. XX/2,
p. 358), characterizing them as being infinitely "open"
and "in flux" (cf. ibid., p. 359). Now it is the
"referent" of the relevant mental file, or individual
notion, that will normally count as the common intentional object of
the experiences bound together in a unified series of successive
intentional horizons in which the object "constitutes
itself" empirically. (In cases where the "referent"
of a mental file changes across time--i.e., is unnoticedly
replaced by another object--the situation becomes more
complicated. The same goes for cases of perceptual judgements leading
to, or taken by the respective subject to be confirming, entries into
an already existing file. See Beyer 2000, sec. 7.) Note that
"constitution" so conceived does not mean
*creation*.



On this reading of Husserl's notion of the determinable
*X*, there is a link, at least in the case of proper names and
in the ubiqituous indexical case, between intentional content
(including determinable *X*) on the one hand, and extra-mental
reality on the other, such that intentional content thus understood
determines reference in much the same way more recent externalist
theories of content would have it, i.e. in such a way that the
referent can in turn be said to help determine the intentional content
(see Beyer 2000, 2001; cf. also Husserl's discussion of Twin
Earth in *Husserliana*, vol. XXVI, p. 212). Notice, however,
that Husserl does not naively take the existence of an extra-mental
referent for granted. Instead, he asks which structures of
consciousness entitle us to represent the world as containing
particular objects transcending what is currently given to us in
experience (see Sections 7 and 8 below).



Husserl can thus be read (or at least be rationally reconstructed) as
both an early direct reference theorist (headword: singularity) and a
non-naive externalist about intentional content and (respective)
meaning.



The dynamic method has us look upon noematic Sinn under the
"functional aspect" of how it enables us to keep the
intentional object "in mind (im Sinn)"
(*Husserliana*, vol. II/1, pp. 196 ff), instead of viewing it
merely statically as a psychological type or species to be
instantiated by isolated moments of consciousness. It makes us regard
any content of the latter sort, particularly "static perceptual
content", as a mere "abstraction from dynamic
content" (Mulligan 1995, pp. 195, 197). This may help to explain
why the species-theory of content had become less important to Husserl
by the time he wrote *Ideas*.


## 5. The phenomenological *epoche*



An externalist reading (or rational reconstruction) of Husserl's
theory of content might, however, be taken to conflict with the
methodological constraints posed by the phenomenological
*epoche*, which--together with the dynamic method
and eidetic reduction--builds the essential core of the
transcendental-phenomenological method introduced in
*Ideas*.



Husserl developed the method of *epoche* or
"bracketing" around 1906. It may be regarded as a
radicalization of the methodological constraint, already to be found
in *Logical Investigations*, that any phenomenological
description proper is to be performed from a *first person*
point of view, so as to ensure that the respective item is described
*exactly as is experienced, or intended*, by the subject. Now
from a first-person point of view, one cannot, of course, decide
whether in a case of what one takes to be, say, an act of perception
one is currently performing, there actually is an object that one is
perceptually confronted with. For instance, it is well possible that
one is hallucinating. From a first-person point of view, there is no
difference to be made out between the veridical and the non-veridical
case--for the simple reason that one cannot at the same time
*fall victim to* and *detect* a perceptual error or
misrepresentation. In the non-veridical case, too, a transcendent
object appears to "constitute itself" in consciousness. It
is for such reasons that Husserl demanded (in *Ideas*) that in
a phenomenological description proper the existence of the object(s)
(if any) satisfying the content of the intentional act described must
be "bracketed". That is to say, the phenomenological
description of a given act and, in particular, the phenomenological
specification of its intentional content, must not rely upon the
correctness of any *existence assumption* concerning the
object(s) (if any) the respective act is about. Thus, the
*epoche* has us focus on those aspects of our
intentional acts and their contents that do not depend on the
existence of a represented object out there in the extra-mental
world.



On closer inspection, however, Husserl actually draws upon two
different versions of the *epoche* when introducing this
method in *Ideas*, which versions he does not separate as
clearly as one might have hoped: the "universal
*epoche*" on the one hand, and a weaker
"local *epoche*" (as one could label it) on
the other. The former version (as described in *Ideas*) seems
to require the phenomenologist to put *all* his existence
assumptions regarding the external world into brackets at once, at any
point, whereas the weaker version merely requires him to bracket
*particular* existence assumptions. The weaker version
underlies the introducing of the notion of *noema* in *Ideas*in connection with examples like the perceptual hallucination (a
concept not applicable within the universal epoche; see
Overgaard 2004, p. 23) of a blooming apple tree (*Husserliana*,
vol. III/1, pp. 204 ff): Husserl here in fact only brackets the
existence of particular real objects (Beyer 2000, pp. 140-148).
By contrast, the sole function of the universal epoche in
*Ideas* seems to be to establish the "residuum"
thesis, according to which the realm of "pure
consciousness" exists independently of the external world. His
argument for this thesis in *Ideas*, referring to the
possibility of "world annihilation", is flawed, however
(see Beyer 2000, pp. 138 ff; 2007, pp. 76ff) and, as Erhard (2014, fn.
718) has observed, Husserl later discovered the relevant fallacy
himself (cf. *Husserliana*, vol. XXXIX, 256f). 



This leaves it an open question what other function the epoche
may serve in the context of Husserl's methodology. The most plausible
interpretation seems to be that "the only thing that is excluded
as a result of the epoche is a certain naivety, the naivety of
simply taking the world for granted, thereby ignoring the contribution
of consciousness (*Husserliana*, vol. 27/173)"
(Zahavi 2017, p. 67; also cf. Landgrebe 1982a, pp. 26 ff), where
"the suspension [of existential positings] in question is
merely propaedeutic and provisional" (Zahavi 2017, p. 58).



Only the method of universal *epoche* as introduced in
*Ideas* seems to conflict with our externalist reading: if no
extra-mental existence assumptions whatsoever are admitted at any
point, then phenomenologically there cannot be object-dependent
intentional contents, as externalism would have it. By contrast, there
may be some such contents, even many of them, without intentional
content generally having to be dependent on a particular extra-mental
object. Which leaves enough room for the method of
*epoche* to apply to any given particular case, as will
become clear in Section 6.


## 6. *Epoche*, perceptual noema, *hyle*, time-consciousness and phenomenological reduction



The point of the local *epoche* can perhaps best be
brought out if we follow Husserl in applying it to the case of
perceptual experience. The phenomenologist is supposed to perform his
or her descriptions from a *first-person point of view*, so as
to ensure that the respective item is described exactly as it is
experienced. Now in the case of perceptual experience one cannot, of
course, both fall victim to and at the same time discover a particular
perceptual error; it is always possible that one is subject to an
illusion or even a hallucination, so that one's perceptual
experience is not veridical. If one is hallucinating, there is really
no object of perception. However, phenomenologically the experience
one undergoes is exactly the same as if one were successfully
perceiving an external object.



Therefore, the (adequacy of a) phenomenological description of a
perceptual experience should be independent of whether for the
experience under investigation there is an object it represents or
not. Either way, there will at least be a perceptual *content*
(if not the same content on both sides, though). It is this content
that Husserl calls the perceptual *noema*. Thanks to its noema,
even a hallucination is an intentional act, an experience "as
of" an object. Phenomenological description is concerned with
those aspects of the noema that remain the same irrespective of
whether the experience in question is veridical or not. Thus, our
phenomenologist must not employ--he (or she) must
"bracket"--his belief in the existence of the
perceptual object.



However, this lands him in a methodological dilemma. If, on the one
hand, the phenomenologist leaves the "natural attitude"
and brackets his corresponding existence-belief, he cannot at the same
time perform the perceptual experience he wishes to investigate. (This
is the first horn of the dilemma.) For, as Husserl himself stresses
(cf. *Ideas*, sec. 90, 109), the existence-belief is an
indispensable part of the perceptual phenomenon: such experiences are
essentially *thetic*, i.e., there can be no such thing as a
perceptual experience without "belief-character" (cf.
*5th Logical Investigation*, sec. 23). If, on the
other hand, our phenomenologist makes use of that belief, then he is
bound to violate the constraints put upon him by the local
*epoche*: he cannot but fail to assume the
phenomenological attitude. (This is the second horn.)



There are at least three possible ways out of this dilemma.
*First*, the phenomenologist could choose the first horn of the
dilemma, but analyse an *earlier* perceptual experience of his,
one that he now remembers. He just has to make sure here not to employ
his earlier (and perhaps still persisting) belief in the existence of
a perceptual object. *Secondly*, he could again decide in
favour of the first horn and analyse a perceptual experience that he
merely intuitively *imagines* himself to have. (For
Husserl's view on imagination see esp. *Husserliana*,
vol. XXIII.) *Thirdly*, he could instead choose the second
horn, keep employing his existence-belief, but make a kind of
"pragmatic ascent" and *describe* the perceptual
experience in such a way that the description, i.e., the *speech
act* thus performed, does not presuppose the existence of a
perceptual object. (The following sort of description may serve that
function: "I am demonstratively identifying a so-and-so";
"I am performing an act of this-meaning under the aspect
*so-and-so*".) In any case, Husserl regards
"bracketing" as what he calls the "neutrality
modification" of a positing act, to be distinguished both from a
corresponding supposition (hypothesis) and from what is commonly
referred to as suspension of judgment, as in a case of serious doubt
(cf. Hua III/1, 247 ff). While in the latter case the subjective
probability may be 0.5, no degree of belief whatsoever can be assigned
to an act of neutrality-modification (cf. Hua III/1, 252).



It is not entirely clear if Husserl considers all of these strategies
to be admissible. The second one is certainly in line with the
important methodological role he ascribes to "phantasy",
i.e., mere intuitive imagination, when it comes to eidetic reduction,
which in turn constitutes an important part of the phenomenological
method. The third strategy--pragmatic ascent--fits in well
with the way he uses to specify the common element of the noema of
both veridical perceptions and corresponding hallucinations (see,
e.g., the first-person description of someone's experience of
"this blooming tree there in space" presented in sec. 90
of *Ideas*; also see ibid., sec. 89f).



Now we can apply the local *epoche* to specify the noema
of both veridical perceptions and hallucinations so as to bring out
their *singularity*. Already in his 1894 essay
"Intentional Objects" (cf. *Husserliana*, vol.
XXII; English translation of a somewhat different version of the essay
in: Rollinger 1999) Husserl stressed that objectless representations
such as hallucinations can in a sense be characterized as
"representing an intentional object", provided that this
characterization is understood to be made "under an existential
assumption", as follows: "*If* the act of
hallucination *were* veridical, it *would* successfully
represent such-and-such an object (under such-and-such
aspects)". Something similar goes with regard to the singularity
of a hallucinatory experience's noema: if such an experience
were veridical, it would, in virtue of its noema, represent a
particular perceptual object in all relevant possible worlds (see
Section 3 above). Thus, we can provide an *existentially
neutral* specification of the noema of a (veridical, illusory or
hallucinatory) perceptual experience, just as local
*epoche* demands, and still bring out the singular
character of their content that Husserl has done so much to uncover,
especially in his investigations into indexicality and the role of the
determinable *X* in our constitution of spatio-temporal
reality. The specification might run as follows: The noema of a
perceptual experience *i* is such that either (1) there is an
object *x* that *i* represents in virtue of its noema,
where *x* is to be regarded as the referent of *i* in
all relevant possible worlds, or (2) there would be an object meeting
condition (1) if *i* were veridical. Condition (2) enables us
to make sense of the behaviour of a speaker/thinker making
counterfactual assumptions about an object which he, unknowingly,
merely hallucinates, or of quantifying into modal statements about
that alleged object (cf. Beyer 2000, pp. 26-31). Notice that on
the above-proposed externalist reading of Husserl's notion of
intentional content, the noema will differ depending on whether
condition (1) or (2) is satisfied. Nevertheless, our noematic
specification meets the requirements of local *epoche*,
as it does not rely on the existence of a particular perceptual
object. If there is no such object, condition (2) will be
satisfied--provided that we are dealing with a perceptual
experience. The rationale behind condition (2) is that even in the
non-veridical case an individual notion (a mental file) and
consequently a unified series of intentional horizons gets activated,
on the basis of the same sensory material, or *hyle*
(see the following paragraph), as in the veridical case.



It should be noted that according to Husserl the complete noema of a
perceptual experience contains an additional element, to be
distinguished from the intentional content, notably its
"thetic" or "positing" character, i.e., its
quality. Moreover, the manner in which the perceptual object (if any)
presents (or would present) itself includes the sensual matter or
"*hyle*" underlying the respective
perceptual experience. Typical examples of *hyle*
include sense impressions (i.e., sensory experiences), as opposed to
the perceptual experiences based upon them. Thus, to take
Jastrow's/Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit head as an example,
the perception of a duck-head may be founded in the same sense
impressions or *hyle* as the perception of a rabbit-head
(cf. Follesdal 1988, pp. 108f). (For Husserl all remaining
intuitive acts involve something analogous (in a sense needing further
explanation) to *hyle*, which he labels as their
"intuitive representational content". In the case of acts
of phantasy, he refers to the intuitive representational content as
"*phantasma*".) Husserl regards sense impressions
as non-intentional (and thus non-conceptual) in nature. It is only the
intentional content of a perceptual experience that
"forms" its underlying *hyle* so as to yield
the perception of an object (for critical discussion see Hopp 2011,
esp. sec. 7.3). Husserl compares this process of intentional
"forming" of sensual matter to the interpretation of a
linguistic expression, but this comparison should not mislead us to
conclude that he subscribes to a sense-datum theory of perception (see
Section 2 above, headword: mental image theory). Rather, his view on
perception is best characterized as a sophisticated version of direct
(i.e., non-representationalist) realism.



Finally, we should note that on Husserl's view there is a
further important dimension to perceptual experience, in that it
displays a phenomenological deep- or micro-structure constituted by
*time-consciousness* (*Husserliana*, vol. X, XXXIII;
also see Miller 1984). This merely seemingly unconscious structure is
essentially indexical in character and consists, at a given time, of
both *retentions*, i.e., acts of immediate memory of what has
been perceived "just a moment ago", *original
impressions*, i.e., acts of awareness of what is perceived
"right now", and *protentions*, i.e., immediate
anticipations of what will be perceived "in a moment". It
is by such momentary structures of retentions, original impressions
and protentions that moments of time are continuously constituted (and
reconstituted) as past, present and future, respectively, so that it
looks to the experiencing subject as if time were permanently flowing
off.



This deep-structure of intentional consciousness comes to light in the
course of what Husserl calls the "phenomenological
reduction" (*Husserliana*, vol. XIII, pp. 432 ff), which
uses the method of *epoche* in order to make coherent
sense, in terms of the essential horizon-structure of consciousness,
of the transcendence of objective reality. The most global form of
*epoche* is employed when this reality in total is
bracketed. There is still something left at this point, though, which
must not, and cannot, be bracketed: the temporal flow of one's
"present" experience, constituted by current retentions
and original impressions. These recurrent temporal features of the
horizon-structure of consciousness cannot be meaningfully doubted.
They provide a kind of *hyle* for "inner
perception" and corresponding reflective judgements, but it is a
very special kind of *hyle*: one that is a proper part
of the "perceived" item and does not get conceptually
"formed" in the course of perception (reflecting the fact
that unlike spatio-temporal objects, lived experiences "do not
adumbrate themselves"; cf. *Husserliana*, vol. III/1, p.
88). Hence, there is no epistemically problematic gap between
experience and object in this case, which therefore provides an
adequate starting point for the phenomenological reduction, that may
now proceed further by using holistic justification strategies. After
all, intentional consciousness has now been shown to be coherently
structured at its phenomenologically deepest level.


## 7. Passivity vs. activity



Hyletic data are arguably experiences, in the sense of
"non-intentional", "pre-reflective lived experiences
that can be grasped only abstractly in reflection" (Gallagher
2011, p. 3). At the same time, at least some of them (the
"kinaesthetic" sensations; cf. Zahavi 2003, p. 107) belong
to the sphere of bodily passivity: they "serve in the
constitution of the experiencing body (the body-as-subject)"
(Gallagher 2011, p. 4; for the distinction between
"body-as-subject" and "body-as-object", cf.
Zahavi 2003, pp. 101-106). The notion of passivity is given
particular emphasis both in the context of Husserl's
genetic-phenomenological analyses, focussing on the dynamic aspects of
self- and object-constitution, and in his reply to the
"objection of solipsism" against transcendental
phenomenology developed in the 5th of his *Cartesian
Meditations* (see Section 10 below). In *Experience and
Judgement* Husserl stresses "that the
distinction between activity and passivity is not a rigid one, that it
cannot be a matter of terms that can be defined once and for all, but
only of means of description and contrast, the meaning of which must
originally be recreated in each individual case with regard to the
concrete situation of the analysis" (Husserl 1939, p. 119). On a
plausible (i.e., epistemological) interpretation, a unit of
consciousness in which something constitutes itself is to be described
as "passive" just in case this constitution occurs
independently of any simultaneous execution of the subject's
will, e.g., its will to acquire knowledge; otherwise, it is to be
described as "active". Passive constitution is sometimes
referred to as "pre-constitution", as it is an
indispensible precondition for active constitution (cf. Landgrebe
1982b, p. 72.) According to the above interpretation, active
constitution in the form of judgements in turn initiates beliefs as
personal "acquisitions (*Erwerbe*)" or
"habitualities" that help pre-constitute the further
course of experience, thus forming a "secondary" level of
passivity (cf. ibid.; for an overview of Husserl's
"phenomenology of habituality" cf. Moran 2011; Caminada
2019 investigates into Husserl's view of habit against the
background of the re-edition of *Ideas II* on the basis of his
original texts; see esp. ch. 10f). 



In the context of the analysis of the constitution of individual
perceptual objects, the spatio-temporally structured "field of
pre-givenness" (Husserl 1939, p. 74) against whose background
the object stands out contrastively (ready to catch the
perceiver's attention) counts as primarily passive (cf. Wu 2021,
sec. 58). This field is structured by "syntheses of
association" between (hyletic adumbrations of) similar and
dissimilar elements (cf. Wu 2020, p. 189). These associative syntheses
are such that (in the case at issue) one of those elements, e.g. a
colored three-dimensional (and thus non-hyletic; cf. Lee 1993, p. 99)
dot, serves as sensual "stimulus" by "instinctively
driving" (*Husserliana Mat.*, vol. VIII, p. 326) the
perceiver to attend to it unwillingly, thus passively
"affecting" the perceiver (*Husserliana*, vol.
XXXIII, pp. 275f; cf. Yamaguchi 1982; Lee 1993; also cf. Mensch 1997;
and Brudzinska 2020, containing a detailed comparison with Freud). If
the stimulus then catches the subject's attention, it can
subsequently be "explicated" perceptually according to its
objectual determinations, in which case the subject enters "the
first main stage of the striving for knowledge, i.e. *the
pre-predicative* or *receptive stage*" (Wu 2021, p.
190). Thus, passivity precedes receptivity, which in turn precedes the
second main stage, i.e. the "predicative" stage -
the level of the "spontaneity" of judgement (cf. Wu 2021,
p. 191). Both of these stages (the receptive and the spontaneous one)
constitute the level of cognitive "activity". At the
second stage, the processing of mental files such as "individual
notions" (see Section 4 above), guided by the subject's
"will to knowledge" (Husserl 1939, p. 92), is located. In
*Experience and Judgement* Husserl calls the
perceptual acts motivating predicative file entries (i.e., habitual
yet variable empirical beliefs) "explications" of
perceptual objects (cf. Husserl 1939, ch. 2). Such explications are
founded in "attention as a tendency of the ego"
"toward the intentional object" (Husserl 1939, p. 85).
(For the multifarious use of the term "attention" in
Husserl cf. the introduction to *Husserliana*, vol. XXXVIII, p.
XXXII; see also the entry on "Aufmerksamkeit" in Gander
2010, pp. 36ff, and the secondary literature cited there, as well as
Breyer 2011, ch. V, and Wehrle 2013, ch. I.)



Note that while Husserl sometimes describes the field of pre-givenness
in which pre-predicative and predicative acts are founded as
"originarily passive" (cf. Husserl 1939, p. 300), he holds
that this field is itself pre-constituted at an even more basic level
of constitution, also sometimes (in another context) described as
originarily or primarily passive. This more basic level is the
"absolutely" originary one of (1) bodily and (2) temporal
pre-reflective self-consciousness, at which (1) the spatial and (2)
the temporal aspects of the field, respectively, constitute themselves
(cf. Wu 2021, pp. 187f). This pre-constitution occurs automatically or
"instinctively", by "association" of
"acquired" affective "drives" and
teleologically directed "courses of drives
(*Triebverlaufe*)" rather than mere "(courses
of) ideas", such that "the ego as the subject of the drive
[...] is awakened" (transcr. A VII 13, p. 20, cited after
Yamaguchi 1982, p. 57). If the subject then acquires an according
affective "habituality", then a new level of
"secondary passivity" has been constituted (cf. Yamaguchi
1982, p. 56). For example, the above-mentioned colored dot is then
ready to be perceived as located, at 'this current moment'
of (internal) time, at 'that position' in 'my
own' (egocentric) perceptual field; it "affects" the
subject accordingly, thus serving as a visual stimulus. This
perceptual field is regarded as 'my own' and 'my
current' one in virtue of its pre-constitution in pre-reflective
self-awareness, in which both the subject's stream of
consciousness and its living body (as it would appear in the
"sphere of ownness", i.e. independently of intersubjective
experience) constitute themselves, notably by both internal
time-consciousness (see Sections 4 and 6 above; cf. Held 1966) and the
instinctive "originary kinestheses" (*Husserliana*,
vol. XV, p. 385) or "kinesthetic syntheses" associated
with the bodily movements involved in perception (cf. Landgrebe 1982b,
pp. 81 ff; also cf. Dodd 1997 for a further analysis of
Husserl's phenomenology of the body, taking into account the
rich material to be found in *Ideas II*, but also in *Thing
and Space* and the 5th of the *Cartesian
Meditations*; and Taipale 2014, stressing the importance of the
living body for the different levels of constitution in Husserl; more
recent literature on embodiment in Husserl, covering topics like the
constitution of the ego's own living body and the living bodies of
others, also includes Behnke 1996; Heinamaa 2011, 2018; Moran and
Janssen, eds., 2018; Carr 2019; and Jardine 2022, ch. 5f).



On (one reading of) Husserl's view, these very basic levels or
strata underlying self- and world-constitution are still
"anonymous", i.e. not available through
(self-)"reflection" (cf. Landgrebe 1982b, p. 76), but only
through the "genetic-phenomenological" method of
"deconstruction" or "dismantling
(*Abbau*)". Dismantling starts from a given noematic
sense, like 'this coloured dot', and tells a story about
how (the intentionality correlated with) this sense could have come
about, to which kinds of "subjective sources" or origins
it implicitly refers back (as their "sedimentation"),
given the transcendental conditions for the possibility of the
corresponding forms of intentionality (cf. Husserl 1939, p. 47). This
dismantling leads back to the associative "originary
pairing" of 'my own', originarily-kinesthetic
pre-constituted living body, on the one hand, and a foreign one
affecting 'my own', on the other, due to similarities
which passively drive the "first 'ego' of the
reduction" (*Husserliana*, vol. XV, p. 586) to
co-constitute 'my own' and the 'other' bodily
ego by accordingly motivated "apperceptive transfer"
(*Husserliana*, vol. I, 140) of the pre-constituted sense
'this living body of mine' to the similarly behaving body
'over there' (cf. A. D. Smith 2003, pp. 224-251).
This co-constitution forms the basis of, first, the co-constitution of
the alter ego as a personal human being and (on this basis; cf.
*Husserliana*, vol. XIV, p. 418) myself as the same kind of
being and, secondly, the constitution objective reality. The (analysis
of the) constitution of the latter is sketched in Section 10 below.
Husserl supposes that its passive pre-constitution
"'instinctively' predeliniates the constitution of
the whole world for me", a teleological "facticity"
perhaps deriving from "God" (*Husserliana*, vol.
XV, p. 385; see Held 2010). (In other words, the spade bends back
here.)


## 8. Communication, sociality, personhood and personal values



As for the constitution of oneself as a person, Husserl
(*Husserliana*, vol. XIV, pp. 170 ff) holds that it occurs,
among other things, in connection with communicative or social acts
("*Mitteilungen*", "*soziale
Akte*"), which are pre-constituted by the mutual drives and
instincts involved in the education of small children who confidently
"imitate" the linguistic behavior of educators
"loving" them like parents (*Husserliana*, vol.
XIV, 165f). (For additional aspects of the constitution of personhood,
see the last two paragraphs of this section and the literature cited
there. Further elements of Husserl's view of personal love, esp.
concerning his ethics, are discussed in Melle 2002; Romer 2011;
Kern 2019, sec. 22f; Crespo 2019; Heinamaa 2020.) The relevant
communicative acts are "I-thou acts", in which the utterer
empathetically ascribes to the addressee the empathetic ascription of
the "intention (*Absicht*)" to motivate the
addressee, by means of his or her recognition of that very intention
(cf. *Husserliana*, vol. IV, p. 192), to behave a certain way
(*Husserliana*, vol. XIV, 166f in the light of
*Husserliana*, vol. IV, p. 192); where utterer and addressee
simultaneously perceive each other (*Husserliana*, vol. XIV, p.
167). Thus, these acts are based on "reciprocal empathy"
(Zahavi 2018, p. 746), notably on "iterated, reflexive empathy:
I *empathetically* ascribe to the Other(s) an
*empathetic* ascription of an intention to *me*"
(Beyer 2018, p. 100). In I-thou acts, the "originarily social
I-thou relationship" is constituted, in which ego and alter ego
deliberately and reflexively motivate each other to display certain
practical forms of behavior (*Husserliana*, vol. XIV, pp.
171f). It is at this stage that the subject constitutes itself as a
person (belonging to the "world of persons") by gaining
"personal 'self-consciousness'" of the sort
just described in the course of I-thou acts (*Husserliana*,
vol. XIV, pp. 171, 175f). This enables the subject to see him- or
herself as subject to acts of *self-determination*: "If I
agree [*Vereinbare ich mich*] with an other [...], the other
determines me to determine myself to take on this or that [commitment;
CB]" (*Husserliana*, vol. XIV, p. 180). (For some other
aspects of the role of communicative acts in Husserl's analyses of
constitution see, e.g., Zahavi 2003, ch. 3, sec. C-D; Caminada
2019, esp. ch. 6., sec. 2f.; also see Sections 9f below.)



It is by self-determination through "position-taking", in
the form of "judgement" or "will", that the
subject constitutes itself as an *individual* person. (For the
following cf. Beyer 2013, pp. 94, 110f. For a more recent analysis,
also taking into account the new critical edition of *Ideas
II*, see Jardine 2022. Also see Jacobs 2010, pp. 353-356.)
What distinguishes an individual personal subject from other such
subjects is a "total" personal "style and
habitus", including "a certain pervasive unitary style in
the way [the subject] decides by judgement and will"
(*Husserliana*, vol. IV, SS61 p. 277; Husserl 1989, p. 290;
also cf. *Husserliana*, vol. IV, SS59, p. 256). This latter
style depends on the subject's habits to let itself be determined by
value-motives, that is, by emotional valuings
("*Wertnehmungen*"; cf. *Husserliana*, vol.
XXXVII, p. 72) and, sometimes, also by accordingly motivated explicit
value judgements, which concern the subject's volitional motives,
regarding which the free subject says 'yes' or
'no'. (These valuings, which motivate the subject's
will, stand to passive emotional affections as full-fledged perceptual
acts stand to their underlying sensual hyle; they can be looked upon
as nonveridical or veridical, and, in the latter case, more or less
adequate perceptions of (instances of) values; cf.
*Husserliana*, vol. IV, sec. 44, p. 215, sec. 45, pp. 227f;
*Husserliana*, vol. XXXVII, p. 326.) 



In the former case (the subject says 'yes') the respective
motive becomes "a position-taking that issues from [the
subject's] own ego", as opposed to a mere stimulus coming from
outside; the subject "annexes" it on his or her "own
accord" (*eignet es sich selbsttatig an*), i.e. it
internalizes the corresponding value (*Husserliana*, vol. IV,
SS60, p. 269; Husserl 1989, p. 281). This enables the subject to
get to know itself as an individual person, i.e. with regard to its
"personal character-traits" (*Husserliana*, vol.
XIV, p. 18), notably by learning "how such and such motives
[...] *would* affect me, how I, as the one that I am, would act
and could act, how I could, and how I could not, judge, value and
will" (*Husserliana*, vol. IV, SS60, p. 265f; Husserl
1989, p. 278). Husserl's conception of individual personhood
also underlies his ethics (see end of Section 9).


## 9. Empathy, intersubjectivity and lifeworld; ethics and value theory



One of the main themes of transcendental phenomenology is
intersubjectivity. Among other things, it is discussed in considerable
detail in the 5th of the *Cartesian Meditations* and
in the manuscripts published in vol. XIII-XV of *Husserliana*(see Kern 2019 for an overview)*.* (A particularly
important critique of Husserl's view on intersubjectivity from a
sociological viewpoint is found in Schutz 1966.)



According to Husserl, intersubjective experience plays a fundamental
role in our constitution of both ourselves as objectively existing
subjects, other experiencing subjects, and the objective
spatio-temporal world. Transcendental phenomenology attempts to
reconstruct the rational structures underlying--and making
possible--these constitutive achievements.



From a first-person point of view, intersubjectivity comes in when we
undergo acts of *empathy*. Intersubjective experience is
empathic experience; it occurs in the course of our conscious
attribution of intentional acts to other subjects, in the course of
which we put ourselves into the other one's shoes. In order to
study this kind of experience from the phenomenological attitude, we
must bracket our belief in the existence of the respective target of
our act-ascription *qua* experiencing subject and ask ourselves
which of our further beliefs justify that existence-belief as well as
our act-ascription. It is these further beliefs that make up the
rational structure underlying our intersubjective experience. Since it
takes phenomenological investigation to lay bare these beliefs, they
must be first and foremost unconscious when we experience the world in
the natural attitude.



Among the fundamental beliefs thus uncovered by Husserl is the belief
(or expectation) that a being that looks and behaves more or less like
myself, i.e., displays traits more or less familiar from my own case,
will generally perceive things from an *egocentric* viewpoint
similar to my own ("here", "over there",
"to my left", "in front of me", etc.), in the
sense that I would roughly look upon things the way he does if I were
in his shoes and perceived them from his perspective. This belief
allows me to ascribe intentional acts to others immediately or
"appresentatively", i.e., without having to draw an
inference, say, by analogy with my own case. So the belief in question
must lie quite at the bedrock of my belief-system. It forms a part of
the already pregiven (and generally unreflected) intentional
background, or "lifeworld" (cf. *Crisis*), against
which my practice of act-ascription and all constitutive achievements
based upon that practice make sense in the first place, and in terms
of which they get their ultimate justification.



Husserl's notion of lifeworld is a difficult (and at the same
time important) one. It can roughly be thought of in two different
(but arguably compatible) ways: (1) in terms of belief and (2) in
terms of something like socially, culturally or evolutionarily
established (but nevertheless abstract) sense or meaning.



(1) If we restrict ourselves to a single subject of experience, the
lifeworld can be looked upon as the rational structure underlying his
(or her) "natural attitude". That is to say: a given
subject's lifeworld consists of the beliefs against which his
everyday attitude towards himself, the objective world and others
receive their ultimate justification. (However, in principle not even
beliefs forming part of a subject's lifeworld are immune to
revision. Hence, Husserl must not be regarded as an epistemological
foundationalist; see Follesdal 1988.)



(2a) If we consider a single community of subjects, their common
lifeworld, or "homeworld", can be looked upon, by first
approximation, as the system of senses or meanings constituting their
common language, or "form of life" (Wittgenstein), given
that they conceive of the world and themselves in the categories
provided by this language.



(2b) If we consider subjects belonging to different communities, we
can look upon their common lifeworld as the general framework, or
"a priori structure", of senses or meanings that allows
for the mutual translation of their respective languages (with their
different associated "homeworlds") into one another.



The term "lifeworld" thus denotes the way the members of
one or more social groups (cultures, linguistic communities) use to
structure the world into objects (*Husserliana*, vol. VI, pp.
126-138, 140-145). The respective lifeworld is claimed to
"predelineate" a "world-horizon" of potential
future experiences that are to be (more or less) expected for a given
group member at a given time, under various conditions, where the
resulting sequences of anticipated experiences can be looked upon as
corresponding to different "possible worlds and
environments" (*Husserliana*, vol. III/1, p. 100). These
expectations follow typical patterns, as the lifeworld is fixed by a
system of (first and foremost implicit) intersubjective standards, or
conventions, that determine what counts as "normal" or
"standard" observation under "normal"
conditions (*Husserliana*, vol. XV, pp. 135 ff, 142) and thus
as a source of epistemic justification. Some of these standards are
restricted to a particular culture or "homeworld"
(*Husserliana*, vol. XV, pp. 141 f, 227-236), whereas
others determine a "general structure" that is "a
priori" in being "unconditionally valid for all
subjects", defining "that on which normal Europeans,
normal Hindus, Chinese, etc., agree in spite of all relativity"
(*Husserliana*, vol. VI, p. 142). Husserl quotes universally
accepted facts about "spatial shape, motion,
sense-quality" as well as our prescientific notions of
"spatiotemporality", "body" and
"causality" as examples (ibid.). These conceptions
determine the general structure of all particular thing-concepts that
are such that any creature sharing the essential structures of
intentional consciousness will be capable of forming and grasping
them, respectively, under different lifeworldly conditions.



The notion of lifeworld was already introduced in the posthumously
published second volume of *Ideas*, under the heading of
"Umwelt", to be translated as "surrounding
world" or "environment". Husserl there characterizes
the environment as a world of entities that are
"meaningful" to us in that they exercise
"motivating" force on us and present themselves to us
under egocentric aspects. Any subject taking the "personalistic
attitude" builds the center of an environment containing such
objects. The personalistic attitude is "the attitude we are
always in when we live with one another, talk to one another, shake
hands with one another in greeting, or are related to one another in
love and aversion, in disposition and action, in discourse and
discussion" (*Husserliana*, vol. IV, p. 183; Husserl
1989, p. 192). The central notion of Husserl's
"Umweltanalyse" is the concept of motivation, whose
application he explains as follows: "how did I hit upon that,
what brought me to it? That questions like these can be raised
characterizes all motivation in general" (*Husserliana*,
vol. IV, p. 222; Husserl 1989, p. 234, with translation change). The
entities exercising motivating force on us owe their corresponding
"meaning" or significance to certain forms of intentional
consciousness and intersubjective processes. Thus, to quote one of
Husserl's examples, "I see coal as heating material; I
recognize it and recognize it as useful and as used for heating, as
appropriate for and as destined to produce warmth. [...] I can use [a
combustible object] as fuel; it has value for me as a possible source
of heat. That is, it has value for me with respect to the fact that
with it I can produce the heating of a room and thereby pleasant
sensations of warmth for myself and others. [...] Others also
apprehend it in the same way, and it acquires an intersubjective
use-value and in a social context is appreciated and is valuable as
serving such and such a purpose, as useful to man, etc."
(*Husserliana*, vol. IV, pp. 186f; Husserl 1989, pp. 196f).



On Husserl's view, it is precisely this
"subjective-relative lifeworld", or environment, that
provides the "grounding soil" of the more objective world
of science (*Husserliana*, vol. VI, p. 134), in the twofold
sense that (i) scientific conceptions owe their (sub-)propositional
content and thus their reference to reality to the prescientific
notions they are supposed to "naturalize" and that,
consequently, (ii) when things get into flux in science, when a crisis
occurs, all that is left to appeal to in order to defend new
scientific approaches against their rivals is the prescientific
lifeworld, as manifested in our according intuitive acceptances (for
references cf. Follesdal 1990a, pp. 139f). This view offers an
alternative to the "naturalistic" stance taken by many
analytic philosophers today.



One of the constitutive achievements based upon my lifeworldly
determined practice of act-ascription is my self-image as a
full-fledged person existing as a psycho-physical element of the
objective, spatio-temporal order. This self-image can be justified by
what Edith Stein, in a PhD thesis on empathy supervised by Husserl
(Stein 1917), has labelled as *iterated empathy*, where I put
myself into the other subject's shoes, i.e., (consciously)
simulate him, under the aspect that he (or she) in turn puts himself
into *my* shoes. In this way, I can figure out that in order
for the other subject to be able to ascribe intentional acts to me, he
has to identify me *bodily*, as a flesh-and-blood human being,
with its egocentric viewpoint necessarily differing from his own. This
brings home to me that my egocentric perspective is just one among
many, and that from all foreign perspectives I appear as a physical
object among others in a spatio-temporal world. So the following
criterion of subject-identity at a given time applies both to myself
and to others: one human living body, one experiencing subject.
However, Husserl does not at all want to deny that we also ascribe
experiences, even intentional ones, to non-human animals. This becomes
the more difficult and problematic, though, the less bodily and
behavioural similarity obtains between them and ourselves.



Before finally turning to the question of what
"objectivity" amounts to in this connection, let us notice
that in Husserl's eyes something like empathy also forms the
basis of both our practical, aesthetical and moral evaluations and of
what might be called intercultural understanding, i.e., the
constitution of a "foreign world" against the background
of one's own "homeworld", i.e., one's own
familiar (but, again, generally unreflected) cultural heritage (cf.
*Husserliana*, vol. XV). Husserl studied many of these
phenomena in detail, and he even outlined the beginnings of a
phenomenological ethics and value theory (cf. *Husserliana*,
vol. XXVIII, XXXVII). In this context, he formulates a
"categorical imperative" that makes recourse to the notion
of lifeworld, or environment, as follows: Always act in such a way
that your action contributes as well as possible to the best (the most
valuable) you recognize yourself to be able to achieve in your life,
given your individual abilities and environment (cf.
*Husserliana*, vol. XXXVII, pp. 251 ff). (This version of the
"categorical imperative" stems from Husserl's post-war
lectures on ethics and value theory. Earlier versions differ
significantly; for the development of Husserl's thought on this and
related issues, see, e.g., Melle 1991; Peucker 2008; Donohoe 2016, ch.
4; Drummond 2018; and Crespo 2021.)



Note that on Husserl's view the will of a free agent, capable of
following this imperative, is always already embedded in a
"volitional context" predelineating the open "future
horizon" of a "full individual life" that the agent
is currently able to lead (*Husserliana*, vol. XXXVII, p. 252),
thus qualifying as a dynamic intentional structure. This individual
life corresponds to the agent's self-determination as an
individual person (see Section 8 above). The valuings underlying this
self-determination can be veridical, and thus suitable for motivating
objectively valid evaluative judgments, because their correlates, i.e.
values, are part of the ideal (but still intersubjectively
constituted) spiritual world (*Husserliana*, vol XXXVI, pp. 217
ff). These values stand in hierarchical relations to each other,
governed by laws to be studied in what Husserl calls formal axiology
(ibid., pp. 226-232). Value-perception in the form of emotional
valuing thus allows for a priori insights. It is such insights that
determine the good will, in that the latter orients itself by the
highest values the subject, on reflection, including a priori
reflection, based on emotion, recognizes him- or herself to be able to
realize in life, given his or her abilities and environment (for the
present paragraph cf. Beyer 2013, sec. 1; for more detailed analyses
of Husserl's ethics and value theory see, e.g., Luft 2010, the
contributions to Luft, ed., 2011 and the literature cited there, as
well as the secondary literature cited at the end of the foregoing
paragraph.)


## 10. The intersubjective constitution of objectivity and the case for "transcendental idealism"



Even the objective spatio-temporal world, which represents a
significant part of our everyday lifeworld, is constituted
intersubjectively, says Husserl. (The same holds true for its
spatio-temporal framework, consisting of objective time and space.)
How so? Husserl starts (again, from a first-person viewpoint) from a
"solipsistic" abstraction of the notion of a
spatio-temporal object which differs from that notion in that it does
not presuppose that any other subject can observe such an object from
his (or her) own perspective. His question is what justifies us (i.e.,
each of us for him- or herself) in the assumption of an objective
reality consisting of such objects, given only this
"solipsistic" conception of a spatio-temporal thing (or
event) as our starting point. On Husserl's view, "the
crucial further step" in order to answer this question consists
in disclosing the dimension that opens up when the epistemic
justification, or "motivation", of intersubjective
experience, or empathy, is additionally taken into account and made
explicit (*Husserliana*, vol. VII, p. 435).



Roughly, his argument goes as follows. In order for me to be able to
put myself into someone else's shoes and simulate his (or her)
perspective upon his surrounding spatio-temporal world, I cannot but
assume that this world coincides with my own, at least to a large
extent; although the aspects under which the other subject represents
the world must be different, as they depend on his own egocentric
viewpoint. Hence, I must presuppose that the spatio-temporal objects
forming my own world exist independently of my subjective perspective
and the particular experiences I perform; they must, in other words,
be conceived of as part of an *objective* reality. This result
fits in well with--in fact, it serves to
explain--Husserl's view, already stressed in
*Ideas*, that perceptual objects are "transcendent"
in that at any given moment they display an inexhaustive number of
unperceived (and largely even unexpected) features, only some of which
will become manifest--will be intuitively presented--in the
further course of observation.



However, according to Husserl this does not mean that the objective
world thus constituted in intersubjective experience is to be regarded
as completely independent of the aspects under which we represent the
world. For on his view another condition for the possibility of
intersubjective experience is precisely the assumption that by and
large the other subject structures the world into objects in the same
style I myself do. It is partly for this reason that Husserl can be
said to adhere to a version of both "realism" and
"idealism" at the same time.



Another, related, reason is that Husserl's argument for realism
is developed in a context in which he defends what he refers to as
"transcendental idealism" (a terminological choice he
would later regret; see Follesdal 1990a, p. 128). During the
years in which his transcendental phenomenology took shape, he
developed a number of "proofs" of this position, most of
which are based upon his conception of a "real
possibility" regarding cognition or the acquisition of
knowledge. By a "real possibility", Husserl understands a
possibility that is such that "something--more or
less-- 'speaks in favour of it'"
(*Husserliana*, vol. XX/1, p. 178). Real possibilities are, in
other words, conceived of as more or less (rationally)
*motivated* possibilities; and Husserl understands motivation
in such a way that it is always *someone* who is motivated a
certain way (cf. *Husserliana*, vol. IV, p. 222). This is why
Husserl subscribes to the following *dependency thesis*: The
real possibility to acquire (empirical) knowledge regarding a
contingent object A (possible world, individual thing, state of
affairs involving such thing; cf. *Husserliana*, vol. XXXVI,
pp. 139f) "requires" an "epistemic subject",
which "either experiences A, or acquires knowledge regarding A
on the basis of experience, or else has the practical possibility (or
the practical ability) to experience A and acquire knowledge regarding
it" (*Husserliana*, vol. XXXVI, p. 139). Husserl also
adheres to the following *correlation thesis* with regard to
empirical reality and real epistemic possibility: If a contingent
object A is real (really exists), then the real (as opposed to the
merely logical) possibility obtains to acquire knowledge regarding A
(cf. *Husserliana*, vol. XXXVI, p. 138, l. 35-36). From
these two propositions--the dependency and the correlation
thesis--he derives the conclusion that the existence of a
contingent object A requires "the necessary co-existence of a
subject either acquiring knowledge" regarding A "or having
the ability to do so" (*Husserliana*, vol. XXXVI, pp.
139f). This is nothing but "[t]he thesis of transcendental
idealism [...]: A nature without co-existing subjects of possible
experience regarding it is unthinkable; possible subjects of
experience are not enough" (*Husserliana*, vol. XXXVI, p.
156).



Why are *actual* subjects of experience supposed to be
necessary? Husserl's answer refers to the notion of
*full* epistemic justification, or *full degree* of real
possibility (with regard to empirical knowledge): "In order for
[a thing of nature] to really exist, and thus in order for the
assumption that it exists to be reasonable or justified not merely in
a restricted but rather in an unrestricted way, i.e. to the fullest
extent, there must be an actual ego in whose experiences [...] the
being of the thing manifests itself [...]."
(*Husserliana*, vol. XXXVI, pp. 76f). Husserl takes this notion
to be applicable (as far as empirical consciousness is concerned) in
case of truth only. Thus, in sec. 16 of *Formal and Transcendental
Logic* he first equates "truth" with "genuine
knowledge" which is "repeatable by any [...] rational
being" (*Husserliana*, vol. XVII, p. 46) and then makes
the (somewhat weaker) claim that truth and such knowledge are
"correlated" (*Husserliana*, vol. XVII, p. 47).
This conception of (empirical) truth, which is already to be found in
*Logical Investigations*, has been compared to ideal
verificationism (cf. Soldati 1994, p. 119) and to Putnam's
internal realism (cf. Beyer 2020, p. 69).



Husserl seems to regard real possibilities as epistemic dispositions
(habitualities), or abilities, that require an actual
"substrate" (cf. *Husserliana*, vol. XXXVI, p.
139). At the same time, he stresses that "surely no human being
and no animal" must exist in the actual world (adding that their
non-existence would however already result in a "change of the
world") (cf. *Husserliana*, vol. XXXVI, p. 121). One way
to make sense of this would be to weaken the dependency thesis, and
the requirement of an actual substrate, and to merely require what
might be called real higher-order possibilities--possibilities
for acquiring epistemic dispositions in counterfactual (or actual)
cases where epistemic subjects would be co-existing--that may
remain unactualized but could be actualized by someone properly taking
into account a multitude of individual epistemic perspectives, by
means of intersubjective experience. But even under this
reconstruction there remains a sense in which the criteria of real
possibility and reality constitution, and the corresponding structure
of the real world, are dependent on an "ego", on
Husserl's view: What counts as a real possibility, or as
epistemically justified, is dependent on the phenomenological subjects
reflecting about such counterfactual cases in the methodological
context of the transcendental reduction and the results they arrive at
in this context.