Abstract
In the present chapter we will reconstruct the development of Husserl’s understanding of the way in which ideal objects are grasped. Three main stages will be distinguished, hence three main methodological tools: the notion of ideation and idealizing abstraction; eidetic or a priori attitude; eidetic reduction. We will extensively elaborate on the emergence of the notion of a priori attitude around 1910–1911, and we will also maintain that the introduction of the eidetic reduction in Ideas I should not be really understood as a new methodological notion but rather as a further development of the notion of attitude.
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Notes
- 1.
“When in the Logical Investigations Husserl speaks of intuition of the universal, he is extending over to this new dimension the concept of intuition in the sense of fulfilment of a mere intention” (Když Husserl mluví v Logických zkoumáních o názoru obecného, přenáší na novou úroveň pojem názor ve smyslu vyplnění pouhé intence) (Janoušek 2014, p. 292). More generally, see the entire last chapter of the book, which deals with the a priori in the early Husserl and in relation to Brentano (pp. 279–314).
- 2.
In the 1902–1903 lectures, Husserl speaks of Abstraktion von aller empirischen Objektivation (Hua-Mat III, p. 77) to mean what we will call “specific abstrahere ab aliquo.”
- 3.
See also Hua XVIII, p. 174: “Looking at this intuited individual, we perform an ‘abstraction,’ i.e., we not only isolate the non-independent moment of collective form in what is before us, but we apprehend the idea in it [wir erfassen die Idee in ihm]: the number five as the species of the form swims into our conscious sphere of reference.” Here, Husserl clearly speaks of abstraction both in the sense of singling out a non-independent and individual moment (the collective form as an individual) and of grasping the corresponding ideal species or idea.
- 4.
“We directly apprehend the specific unity redness ‘itself’ based on a singular intuition of something red, but we perform a peculiar act, whose intention is directed to the ‘idea,’ the ‘universal.’ Abstraction in the sense of this act is wholly different from the mere attention to, or emphasis on, the moment of red; to indicate the differences we have repeatedly spoken of idealizing or generalizing abstraction. This is the act aimed at by traditional talk of ‘abstraction:’ through ‘abstraction’ in this sense we do not get at individual features, but at general concepts (direct representations of attributes as unities for thought). The same talk possibly extents over conceptual representations of the more complex forms indicated; in the representation an A, several A’s, and so on, there is an abstraction from all other properties. The abstract representation A takes one new ‘forms,’ but acquires no new ‘matter’” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 225–226).
- 5.
In §16 of LU II, Husserl directly tackles the form das A (in specie), whose “meaning-content” is said to be that of “a wholly different sort of universality, namely, the universality of the species” (Hua XIX/1, p. 153). What we encounter here is an essentially new mode of representation, in which we become aware of eine neue Art von Einzelheiten, the specific ones (Hua XIX/1, p. 154).
- 6.
Which means that no more misleading reading of this point can be found than the one defended by Gilbert Ryle, who polemically contends that Husserl’s understanding of essences (for Ryle does not make any fine-grained distinction), hence of the relevant act of intuition responsible for “giving” them, results in the idea of “concepts” as “crystallized in a splendid isolation” (Ryle 2009, p. 192). For an important contribution on the relationship between states of affairs and ideas/essences in Husserl, see Sowa (2007). In light of Ideation.6, one can affirm that “le concept d’idéation oscille ainsi entre l’intuition et la pensée discursive” (Sivák 2015, p. 71) only if this is not taken to mean some sort of ambiguity on the part of Husserl; otherwise, one would simply be missing the very context in which this concept is worked out.
- 7.
This point has been perfectly captured by Heidegger (1979, p. 91): “The individual is indeed founding, but in such a way that it is precisely not co-intended, as it is in the ‘and’ of conjunction, which co-intends both this and that, raises this ‘a and b’ up into the new objectivity. Here, however, the founding objectivity is not taken up into the content of what is intended in ideation.”
- 8.
In reference to such conceptual distinction, it is worth noticing that also the “status” that Husserl recognizes them is different: for, while the notion of categorial act in the first meaning is said to be the result of an Erweiterung-operation regarding the concepts of “intuition” and “object” (Husserl himself speaks of erweiterter Sinn [Hua XIX/2, p. 672]), the categorial act in the second sense seems to be considered a “brand new” concept. That of “universal intuition, Husserl explains, is “an expression which no doubt will not seem better to many than ‘wooden iron’” (Hua XIX/2, p. 690).
- 9.
For an analysis of these expressions and their historical roots, see de Libera (2014, pp. 40–41). As for Husserl himself, if the state of affairs is the one just presented, then it becomes quite difficult to try to categorize his position based upon the “nominalism”-“realism” dichotomy according to the way in which they are understood by, for example, Moreland (1989, p. 664): “A nominalist is one who holds that an entity like redness is outside the being of its instances and not in them as the entity which constitutes their nature. Instances like red1, and red2, are simples with no further entities in them, they stand one another in the relation of exact similarity, and they stand to redness in a primitive type/token relation which is similar to the ∈ of set membership without extensionality of the latter … By contrast, a realist is one who holds that a universal is a multiply exemplifiable constituent in its instances. The universal is the essence of those instances and the ground of their resemblance with other instances of the same universal. Thus, red1, and red2, are complex entities which have the same nature, redness, and they stand to that nature in a basic relation which is the tie of predication between the redness and a bare particular in each instance.”
- 10.
See also a 1907 manuscript, now published in Hua XLI, pp. 34–35, wherein exactly the same kind of problems are raised.
- 11.
If Husserl writes that not “every abstraction is necessarily based on an individual phenomenon,” it is because de facto there is a certain form of abstraction that builds on previously given individual phenomena, i.e., empirical abstraction.
- 12.
For a more detailed presentation of this aspect, see Sowa (2008).
- 13.
In The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl employs the still vague term of Haltung, specifically Geisteshaltung, and speaks, for example, of philosophische Geisteshaltung (Hua II, p. 17). Already in 1909 (Hua-Mat VII), Husserl makes extensive use of the concept of attitude, notably of the distinction between transcendental, natural, and psychological attitudes. Based on the material at our disposal, it can be surmised that it is around 1906–1907 that Husserl starts employing the concept of attitude (in the same period of the so-called “transcendental turn”), even though one has to wait until the 1910–1911 lectures to have a direct systematic assessment. The analysis of why Husserl feels the need to introduce such a concept will not be assessed here, for it belongs to the discussion of the transcendental dimension of Husserl’s thought, which we are leaving aside: in fact, Husserl seems to first resort to the concept of attitude to make sense of the transcendental attitude, namely, of the specific dimension that is disclosed by the transcendental reduction.
- 14.
A side note by Husserl himself reads: “eidetic attitude” (eidetische Einstellung).
- 15.
“La expresión mundo se pluraliza,” as noticed by Serrano de Haro (2016, p. 98).
- 16.
Here is how Husserl himself will describe, in Ideen…I, the relation between the one world of the natural attitude and the “many” other worlds, with specific reference to the “world of arithmetic”: “The arithmetical world is there for me only if, and as long as, I am in the arithmetical attitude. The natural world, however, the world in the usual sense of the term, is and has been there for me continuously as long as I go on living naturally. As long as this is the case, I am ‘in the natural attitude,’ indeed both mean precisely the same thing … I appropriate to myself the arithmetical world and other similar ‘worlds’ by assuming the relevant attitude” (Hua III/1, pp. 59–60).
- 17.
Which Husserl quickly employed in §52 of the Sixth Logical Investigation to account for the relation between “universal intuition” and the act that functions as its basis.
- 18.
See also the preliminary discussion of the notion of “theoretical interest” in the 1904–1905 lectures (Hua XXXVIII, pp. 112–113).
- 19.
We want to express our gratitude to Claudio Majolino for allowing us to read and use text from lectures on the notion of attitude in phenomenology delivered at the “Husserl Archive” in Leuven. See the published version of this text in Majolino (2020). On the concept of attitude in Husserl’s phenomenology, see the systematic account presented by Luft (2002, pp. 35–78); on the relation between “natural” and “personalistic” attitudes, see Staiti (2009).
- 20.
Let us hasten to point out that, even philologically, reduce and reducere suggest a “bringing-back” sort of operation, e.g., “to bring back home (from an exile).” Accordingly, the Husserlian reduction (whether “transcendental” or just “eidetic”) is not meant to signify a reduction of something down to something else (e.g., the world to consciousness or fact to essence), but to bring the attention from something back to something else (e.g., “pure consciousness” or the “pure essence”). On these points, see the Oxford Latin Dictionary entry on “Reduco.”
- 21.
“We can undertake an ‘eidetic reduction,’ exclude all questions about existence, about the judgment-positing of the latter, and carry through the attitude of purely eidetic research. We concern ourselves then with the eidos, with the essence ‘perception,’ and with what belongs to a perception as such” (Hua V, p. 40). Let us remark that, whereas the transcendental reduction belongs to phenomenology alone, the eidetic reduction is a tool available to any eidetic science.
- 22.
Needless to say, the “re-inclusion” can obtain thanks to the eidetic investigation of consciousness and its structures, notably the noetic-noematic “correlation,” which is what makes the “application” of phenomenology actually possible: for, whatever is re-included is re-included precisely by virtue of its being a noematic pole of correlation. Accordingly, it falls outside the actual scope of the method of “transcendental reduction,” the goal of which is exclusively to lead us to (b).
- 23.
The next chapter will elaborate on the difference between (B) and (C) in terms of the different propositional modes of referring oneself to them, which Husserl dubs “eidetic judging” and “judging about pure essences per se”).
- 24.
(D), the “application” of the eidetic findings to what has been excluded, is being left out of the account because it will be more extensively and systematically tackled over the course of the next two chapters.
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De Santis, D. (2021). Ideation, Attitude, Reduction. In: Husserl and the A Priori. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 114. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69528-6_7
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